We would not have to worry about our weight if we lived within a normal food environment. But we don’t. The truth is that our food supply is contanimated and poisoned. There are no other words for it. It’s gotten to the point that it’s not even about the excess of sugar or whatever that is contained in our food - although there is an excess of sugar - it’s about hyper processed, industrialized edible substances which are designed in a lab to overrule our hormonal and neurological pathways that regulate appetite and metabolism.
80 years ago someone might be somewhat overweight, and that balance will start shifting further with age as their body reacts differently to protein and packs on slightly more fat and slightly less lean muscle mass. That reasonable coating of fat compared to everyone else is down to age, genetics, epigenetics, and does confer health benefits. But it was not obesity except for around 1% of the population. It was not widespread non alcoholic fatty liver syndrome or type 2 diabetes. Because in the world of today, once you have enough food to feed your population, the only way to grow a food company is to erode traditional cooking culture and to induce people to overeat. Capitalism is the systemic problem, not the lack of diet and exercise. Or bad parenting for that matter.
So ultimately there are two dimensions to this. On an individual basis it is illogical not to worry about your weight. Just as it is illogical not to worry about becoming addicted to a harmful substance. Because you and your family and friends are under attack by the capitalist mold of our food companies. They create soft, addictive food that prey on the most vulnerable amongst us. And render ALL of us sick. Full on obesity fucks up your joints, your breathing and your heart. But it’s not just a complicating factor, it’s a symptom that not everyone shows. A plurality of thin people are also on the road to fatty liver syndrome and type 2 diabetes. They often just don’t know it.
Whereas on a societal level we require a large political pushback that forces government to deal with the hyper processed menace. Hyper processed goods, sugar, white bread, fruit juice, and so on must all be treated with the same fear as cigarettes and the same respect as alcohol. And it won’t be easy getting there. The food industry lobby is powerful as fuck, global and capable of toppling governments. From what I understand, when the Brazilian government issued the new dietary guidelines, opposition from the food industry was so severe it nearly killed the administration. And what it recommended boiled down to ‘avoid hyper processed goods, use processed goods as part of a meal centered on in natura goods, cook more often and as a part of a family and social experience’.
When we start doing just that, we might not become the thinnest person in our social group. But we have such a better time at life. Once we are free from addiction food is more nourishing, taste better, and all the underlying psychological issues that tie us to that addiction become something we can actually tackle.
You can bet however that there’s a legion of highly paid ghouls whose job is to keep you under lock and chain. The most dangerous words in the english language today are: a calorie is a calorie, and it’s your personal responsibility that you’re fat and sick.
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So here’s the thing, I don’t really face these sorts of people IRL. Or even this sort of thinking, much. But I do run into the incomplete thinking about calories. To which I try to give a short and straightforward answer. Losing weight is Calories and Calories out, but not all Calories are the same. There are calories that are unfulfilling. There are Calories that are addictive. There are Calories that make you sick. You wouldn’t go on a diet to lose weight and improve your health by counting 1500 calories of whisky every day because that’d be insane.
From then on you can open the discussion towards all the other pitfalls of modern diet. Soft, white bread. Fruit juice. Mayonnaise, other industrialized sauces. And so on. Eventually you can work all the way to recognizing ultra processed food for what it is. It’s not food, it’s industrialized edible substances meant make you addicted.
That said, I do have a personal experience with being a bigot myself. I’ve lost weight twice in my life. Once currently. The first time was nearly ten years ago. I did so mostly for aesthetics, I was young and healthy at the time. And I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. I went to a nutritionist, got their input, adapted it a bit to my tastes and just ate smaller portions while doing increasingly more intense water workouts on my own. This allowed me to lose about 30 kilos and improved my life considerably. Then, for health reasons, I could no longer exercise. I had to go through surgery and that sent me on a depressive spiral where I regained that weight and some more over the course of the decade.
Here’s the thing though, I believed that my primary motivator was the chaining of exercise and dieting with one another. If I exercise that morning, then I’ve got too much sunk investment not to eat less over the day. But there were other more toxic behaviors that kept me on the game. I browsed the subreddit fatlogic every single day, just so I could feel superior to these caricatures of people who really are victims not only of their own decisions, but of the food environment they exist in. Cardboard cutouts of fat activists and addicted people meant to be raged at, gawked at. Once I could no longer exercise I became human again. I could no longer gawk at anyone. I was just another sick person in this sick world.
Today I’ve lost 35 kilos, there’s still a few ways more I wish to go. My exercises are much milder. I’ve learned how to cook. I’ve learned all the there was to reasonably learn about metabolic pathways and hyper processed food. I do exercise by walking around my neighborhood, which is pleasing in itself (it’s not the nicest place but it’s home). My diet is focused on my daily well being, so while I do count calories the key thing I do is that I practice fasting because it does make me feel better. Overall, I think I’ve entered a much more conscious path to self improvement that has rendered me completely disgusted at the subreddit. I can’t really read it anymore. It’s not just because I don’t need it. It’s because it runs counter to the person I’ve become after struggling with the food addiction, having a ‘fall from grace’, and now entering a much surer phase of the struggle that truly approaches a sustained victory.
At the end of the day CICO is like finding a lifeboat. It’s not unimportant, it’s you surviving in the storm. But when it comes to the poisoning of our food supply, CICO is not enough. What you need is solidarity. What you need is to save the ship from sinking with the rest of the crew in it. And Solidarity is all about policy, looking after society, and really just treating people not as things but as people. Confronting their issues, but always extending a hand. There’s no such thing as cruel kindness, just as there’s no such thing as pure niceness. You’re either kind or you’re not.
You wouldn’t go on a diet to lose weight and improve your health by counting 1500 calories of whisky every day because that’d be insane.
now, twinkies on the other hand…
cico is correct and works, but the hard part is sticking with it and handling the pain and stress of constant hunger, especially in capitalist society
The thing about the constant hunger is that it’s learned. Hyperprocessed foods make you more hungry, all the time. Everyone knows about insulin resistance, well if you’ve got that you probably also have leptin resistance. Which means the hormonal feedback loops that make you satiated are suppressed by fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes.
Then there’s the mechanical side of things. A diet based on hyper processed foods is poor in fiber, which not only means your digestion happens too quickly, but the impact of the incoming nutrients (read: sugar) into your bloodstream is that much more severe. Fibers form a protective layer in your gut and feed its bacteria. Without it you have neither.
Then there’s depression that flows from the excessive dopamine feedbacks into your brain, the re-wiring of your brain to actually enjoy artificial sweeteners, the growth of your stomach, the cultural aspect of losing out on cooking as a human experience and snacking all the time. There’s two dozen different ways you can analyze the effects of these foodstuffs and they aren’t just bad, they all compound on each other.
Of course, the social stigma associated with being fat doesn’t help. And once you’re up there, neither do the diseases associated with excessive weight. I’ve had more than one person die in my family after giving up on their lives because they couldn’t walk any more, ‘anyways’.
Going keto, or vegan, or fasting, doing the mediterranean diet, and so on. All of these methods always go back to the same thing. Cooking and rejecting hyper processed foods. You can’t go keto on stuff like sausage because it has carbs in it. Vegans at most eat hummus, not some fast food franken dip. And if there’s one thing that fasting does is break the ‘digesting literal garbage all the time’ effect. CICO is so much easier to do and much more reasonable once you aren’t hungry for - and I harp on this because apparently its the academic term - industrialized edible substances all the time.
I think the great struggle against the food industry is long in the making. It will be like cigs all over again. There will be a thousand quack studies and, I’m sure of it, astroturfed social media movements all about discrediting the mounting evidence against hyper processed foods. The worst thing is, they are totally gonna use environmentalism to sell hyperprocessed fake meat rather than just support a transition to eating beans more often than not.
It’s the opposite where I live. Food isn’t abundant here so we tend to be on the leaner side. City dwellers will comment on what “great shape” we’re in and we just laugh because it’s not like we had much of a choice in being thin.
Yeah lol. Though in South Africa there’s that, and also the people that become overweight from just eating cheap carbohydrates and not much else . So you get both high rates of malnutrition and obesity
Before covid it I used to work out every day. I never lost any weight but I was built like a sumo wrestler and my blood levels were perfect. I lost momentum with a little bit of long covid and it had been hard to get any kinda momentum re-established
Momentum is a bitch and work feels like it’s designed to fuck with it.
Nice routine you’ve got there… it’d be a shame if you had to open next week/go out of town
The focus should be on nutrition and exercise, not aesthetics. Just cooking 80-90% of my meals, not eating or drinking a bunch of empty calories, and going for a walk/run/bike ride at least 4 times per week was enough to lose 25lbs a few summers ago. But I wasn’t focused on weight, I just wanted to stop feeling like shit all the time. I had a ton of energy and my sleep was better, too. Kind of fell off the wagon but I’m getting back there after I started cooking again recently.
While individuals can find space for weight loss regimes, it really is a society-level problem.
Consider an experiment with two populations of rats. One population gets a normal amount of food, the other gets the same food with a bunch of added sugar. Of course the population with added sugar gets fatter. But, while the average rat may have gained 10% weight or whatever, on an individual level you’ll see a wide range of results - some rats aren’t effected by the increased sugar, some gain a small amount of weight, some gain a lot.
This is basically exactly what we’ve done to ourselves in capitalist society over the past seventy-ish years, taken our previous diet and jacked it up with a ton of sugar (and other additives and a lot of increased volume). But while with the rats it’s easy to see that all you have to do to return the overweight population to normal is to stop adding sugar to their food, with humans we can’t see that because we’ve created a system that blames you for getting sick.
It’s like building a coal power plant in the middle of a neighborhood, and then blaming the residents when they start getting asthma or worse, and holding up the people who won the genetic lottery and don’t get lung disease as the example we should all strive to replicate.
Consider an experiment with two populations of rats. One population gets a normal amount of food, the other gets the same food with a bunch of added sugar. Of course the population with added sugar gets fatter. But, while the average rat may have gained 10% weight or whatever, on an individual level you’ll see a wide range of results - some rats aren’t effected by the increased sugar, some gain a small amount of weight, some gain a lot.
You don’t even need this. Just go to a Whole Foods and then to the Grocery Store/convenience store serving the poorest part of your city.
Ignore the bourgeois beauty standards
Fast not for thinness or weight loss.
Fast for the lowered alcohol tolerance so you can get drunk quicker thus saving money.
I’m on semaglutide fuck the haters. I’ll take my capitalist antidote for their food chain poison.
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I used to know a mod of that sub. He is now a cop and officer in the national guard, so that tracks.
technically correct
Is it? The first law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems
As someone that directly brigaded FPH way back when I’ll put some things out there. Calories in calories out started basically just to demystify a lot of the bullshit around health, diet and fitness. There is a constant ongoing push in that space to make it super complicated to sell you shit. From Gwyneth Paltrows PT installing linen pulleys because women shouldn’t lift weight to Liver Kings liver diet to all of the thousands of articles about all kinds of superfoods, brainpower tablets and what else is out there.
I don’t think anyone denies the objective reality of our societies situation. People are supposed to have properly cooked meals but that takes time and energy so we’d have to have shorter work hours. People are supposed to get some daily activity in but you can’t bike anywhere because cars. You can’t walk anywhere because everything is spread apart and you can’t participate in group sports because media empires put out ‘content’ for you to watch and neoliberalism is slowly destroying social groups anyways.
But to me that means we have to claw back some subjective control over this situation and it works best by cutting through a lot of the bullshit
and we have piles and piles of external stimuli eroding our willpower which you need to consciously ignore huger signals from your body. if you’re poor and alienated then the happy chemicals from eating fat and sugar might be the only thing you have that makes you feel good.
I don’t get your point? Like yes again there’s an external reality that is causing obesity but you just go “this is a thing and it will continue to be a thing” which is at least to me a very convenient like ‘can’t do anything about that’. I think we ought to fight back against it build tools and encourage people to again claw back a kind of subjective reality/control. Feels a bit like a leftist going “well Marx wrote that the revolution will happen when the conditions are right so i’ll just sit in my comfy armchair”
And yet Marx did not fight in the revolutions of '48, much to the chagrin of other communists who, while respecting his academic output, did not respect his actual physical input to the movement. And yet Marx’s academic contributions are what survive, not any of the political structures formed by the '48 political movements.
There is no point to revolt if the conditions do not support it. There is a point to organizing and maintaining proletariat and vanguard political structures.
You cannot revolt against the material conditions, they are what they are and will continue to be so, changing naturally through dialectical processes, and recognizing that is powerful. You can organize social structures within those material conditions though, that have the power to supercede and take advantage when the material conditions change. You are correct, the powerful move is to try to find a cooking class or even a workout group. But those options are not available for many people. The goal then is to provide the opportunity for it as best we can.
ok then just die I guess? Like I really really don’t know what you or robot dog are meaning to say here other than “ya can’t do anything about it stopid”. Which I disagree with and I’ll do my own little thing thank you very much. I don’t blame people for their body weight and don’t make fun or put people down for it, but I don’t think it’s just “Superstructure too powerful”
Your hyperbole doesn’t help with comprehension. No one is telling you to die. No one is calling you stupid.
That is literally the opposite of what I am saying.
You can and should ‘do your own little thing’, just as I do mine, but it doesn’t alter the super-structure because it is informed by the structure and the structure is informed by the material conditions of existence which changes due to class conflict concerning the control of the means of production, and contradictions within those cycles of production. People are going to be sick and fat because the capitalist system requires them to be sick and fat because it is easier to extract profit from excess production from the sick and fat. It’s not the super-structure that is too powerful, it is the structure that is too powerful, a much fundamentally larger problem.
Because of this regression to the mean is fairly inevitable, pretending your individual diet and exercise routine is revolutionary political praxis is a mistake, equating it to revolutionary political praxis is quite literally consumer liberal moralism masquerading as leftist theory and politics. If you were to say, start a community cooking club or a rotational vegan cooking group, that is closer to approaching political praxis, as it is setting up a structure that can take advantage of a crisis in the cycles of production to push for political power. It has less to do with the fact that you are cooking, and more to do with the fact that you are self-organizing. Recognizing the difficulty of doing and sustaining that, not trivializing it, is the one of the first steps in doing leftist praxis.
From the New York Crimes
Worth remembering - within certain ranges obesity isn’t actually correlated with poor health outcomes, the stress of trying to maintain a strict diet regime causes chronic stress damage by itself, chronic stress and environmental factors have at least as much to do with obesity as what you eat, poverty and things like food deserts or just not having the time, energy, or money to cook drives obesity, depression drives obesity, sedentary lifestyles drive obesity.
And, the most important one - considerably more than 90% of people who undertake a calorie restriction diet regain all the lost weight, or more, within 5 years.
Like don’t get me wrong, i hate the way I look and would be thrilled to drop 70 pounds, but the obsession with weight is anti-scientific, actively counter-productive, and viciously individualizes societal problems. For people who aren’t so heavy that it’s causing serious impairment in mobility cardio and a little strength training are far more important than worrying about weight, and the evidence pretty clearly says that struggling to lose weight is worse for your health than not doing that.
considerably more than 90% of people who undertake a calorie restriction diet regain all the lost weight, or more, within 5 years.
Is this true? This study suggests that 20% of people who lose weight keep the weight off, and that the longer the weightloss is maintained, the more likely they are to keep it off
I am open to the idea that i am wrong.
Your point still stands no matter the % tbh.
I’ve seen a lot of people (mostly women) who are not even close to being considered even chubby stress about their weight because they gained like 2kg. Our obsession with weight is really unhealthy and has little to do with actual health concerns.
And, the most important one - considerably more than 90% of people who undertake a calorie restriction diet regain all the lost weight, or more, within 5 years.
That doesn’t mean much really. The failure rate for going vegetarian or vegan is about the same, between 80-90%. It’s about the same for any major dietary change. Changing what you eat is extremely difficult, no matter what the change is, weather it’s eating less, eating more, or eating different foods. Most people will fall back into old habits at some point. It’s not an individual problem, it’s a problem with the food industry and society, like you said in the last paragraph. That doesn’t mean individuals shouldn’t try change where they can though. It’s much harder than it should be, but it is worthwhile at the end of the day.
That doesn’t mean much really. The failure rate for going vegetarian or vegan is about the same, between 80-90%. It’s about the same for any major dietary change. Changing what you eat is extremely difficult, no matter what the change is, weather it’s eating less, eating more, or eating different foods. Most people will fall back into old habits at some point. It’s not an individual problem, it’s a problem with the food industry and society, like you said in the last paragraph. That doesn’t mean individuals shouldn’t try change where they can though. It’s much harder than it should be, but it is worthwhile at the end of the day.
I mean, it does mean much. It means that any attempt at doing so is more or less fruitless and people who say otherwise are just exhibiting confirmation bias and are almost certainly more privileged than the 90%. And of course I’d also say that’s why moralizing vegetarian or vegan diets is also nonsense for the same reason.
No, it really doesn’t mean much. Claiming it’s fruitless to try to make a lifestyle change because most people who try fail isn’t helpful to anyone. About 85% of former smokers relapse within the first year, but if a friend of yours wanted to quit smoking, would you tell them “oh, you shouldn’t even try because you’ll just fail anyway”? I would personally encourage them and try to be a support system they could lean on! Likewise, if I had an overweight friend who wanted to lose weight, I’d support them!
When I was obese and losing weight, I appreciated my friends who supported and encouraged me a whole lot more than the “friends” who tried to sabotage me by telling me stuff like “weight loss is impossible for most people.” (And both groups of friends had underweight, overweight, and normal weight people.)
I know it’s not your main point but I think this is a bad argument against veganism. Yes it’s hard not to eat flesh in a flesh-eating society. How else are we supposed to build a society that allows people to be vegan? Even under socialism, governments won’t ban slaughterhouses or whatever without a movement asking them to. The presence of just a few resolute vegans allows other people the social space to do the same thing. One vegan goes hungry at the pizza party. If you have three, maybe you order falafel instead.
