Oddbean

Part of me is telling me to get out the brush cutter and finish cleaning up the yard. But a significant other part of me is telling me to be lazy and stay on the computer.... and these thoughts went through my head: Being fat is an evolutionary adaptation to food scarcity. So is being lazy. By being lazy you conserve energy. Don't feel like your fat lazy body reflects some kind of moral failing. You were born fat and lazy for a good reason which just doesn't happen to make sense anymore in the modern food-rich world. If your ancestors weren't fat and lazy, you likely wouldn't even exist! Samoans and Hawai'ians can be quite fat. Being fat was a huge (pun intended) advantage for sea-faring people. If the ship runs out of food, the fat people are the likely survivors. If you get separated from your boat and float for days, fat people float better, are better insulated against hypothermia, and can last longer having more energy. Ocean travel doesn't require much running or load bearing activities. I can imagine a long history of accidents, storms, and ya know all the shit that life throws at you, and in many of these cases the fatter Samoans and Hawai'ians lived to tell the tale, and more to the point lived to have kids. Fat shaming doesn't work. We fatter people are piss poor at fighting against these genetics. I have a lifetime of trying and first hand knowledge. It isn't just about food choice (I only buy healthy food) or mindless eating, although bad choices can certainly make it worse. It is a drive that irritates your brain until you satisfy it, and significant weight loss makes programming a computer (for example) impossible to focus on against those constant amygdala wake-ups. https://yt.thesamecat.io/watch?v=V1bFr2SWP1I

One of the hard lessons I have had to learn: Don't be a tyrant to yourself. Make the best choices you can. Not everyone is the same, so don't use what others are as a template for what you should be.

Fat shaming indeed does not work - people only change if they want to change and shaming will not be the impetus for change. The people I’ve seen drop weight and keep it off have all done so after health issues and to one degree or another reckoning with their own mortality. “I’ve never met an obese 80 year old” springs to mind - if you want to live to an old age, you’re going to have to internalise this yourself. Israel lived to 38. America’s now-declining life expectancy *surely* has to do with their obesity rates finally catching up with the population and will continue until people take this into their own hands. Sadly it seems too many are putting their faith in pharmaceuticals rather than actually taking responsibility for themselves. https://i.nostr.build/a4EQ.jpg

These are complicated topics. Now I want to comment on a lot of them. I'm nowhere near as fat as Israel was, and I don't know what it is like to be like that. But I know what it is like to be 100kg. I lost major weight twice. First because I was desperate to attract a mate that was as hot as I wanted her to be. I got down to 78kg (from 100kg). I kept it off for 3 years but lost focus. Without a constant life focus on keeping it off, it comes back fast. The second time I had sudden pulsitile tinnitus of unknown etiology. It scared me enough to lose 15kg. But that came back after a year or so. Now I'm suffering pretty bad sleep apnea, but I'm on a CPAP machine, so I don't have the "I'm so scared I'm gonna die I need to lose weight fast" impetus this time. But even if I did, it's easy to predict that the loss would again be temporary. You will get a somewhat different outcome if you keep trying even though you know you will fail, than if you give up because you know you will fail. I keep trying anyways in order to get the marginal or temporary better outcome. But when smug and proud never-been-fat people tell me how it is (and are clearly far from correct) it kinda pisses me off. Henry Kissinger was still pretty chubby when he died recently at 100 from congestive heart failure. George R.R. Martin is 75, and he's fatter than I am. Very fat people like Israel, however, have no chance to live that long. Population obesity rates have been increasing. That is not explained by evolutionary ancestry... something else is going on. And I do not know the answer to that riddle (maybe it is solved but I don't know the answer). But my father was at least as heavy as I am, and his mother was huge, and my mother was overweight too. So I have an ancestry explanation. As for life expectancy, I think either the virus or the vaccine has caused this. People are dying for reasons that aren't easy to coorelate to the original cause. If someone young dies of pericarditis, well that was the vaccine. But most of the deaths could go either way -- might be a long-term side effect of having had COVID, or it might be a long-term side effect of having had the vaccine. In NZ, our life expectancy has not dropped like yours has. We locked down the country and only got COVID later on (I think delta) and smashed it, then we got it again when Omicron came through. Omicron was so mild it probably didn't cause the same long-term effects. But we still do have elevated excess deaths... they just haven't affect life expectancy... and there is some evidence that the vaccine is responsible.

I was up and down 3 times through my 20s, much larger swing from tops to bottoms than you and I have kept it off for 6 going on 7 years now. Again others I know who did similar were all health scares who internalised that being way over weight was going to cut years off their lives, successfully keeping weight off means behavioural changes not just crash dieting or exercise sprints now and then. Wouldn’t look to the likes of Kissinger - those people have access to things you and I do not have. Not just the best doctors money can buy, but you think he’s going on a waiting list if he needs a new kidney? I doubt it.. NZ life expectancy may not have dropped but excess deaths have increased post Covid (AUS & NZ were the only two countries that had a positive correlation between lockdowns and death rates to my own chagrin - every other country showed negative correlations). They also don’t have the obesity rates of the US - sure the Māoris are fatties but they’re not meaningfully shifting national level stats whereas in the US it’s all major demographics that have seen obesity skyrocket in the past 30 years, far ahead of other nations who are all getting fatter but at slower rates. We’re never going to get answers from “public health” about any of this given how ideological and captured they are and as your health is directly tied to your life and no-one else’s, it’s incumbent on individuals to make changes rather than wait for approved scientists who are captured and provably full of shit to come up with things.

I have no faith in public health either. Almost all of science has been corrupted. Besides the woke nonsense, drug companies pay to buy the research that sells their drug, and journals don't publish negative results. It's a giant clusterfuck that only has the form of the real science that came before it. I won't take any drug that came to market after about 1995. I know several people who got real fat and came back down again. But they don't have genetic obesity, it was a situation (usually depression) that they resolved and then the fat came back off. But hell, I hope nothing I said make you think you can't win. Keep on winning. I'm impressed and I'm probably wrong. I just say what I think and usually people correct me.

I was 215lb with zero muscle. I started fasting a day a week and sometimes longer, started chewing my food 10x more, eating lots of rice, peanut butter, vegetables, and cut out ALL sugar and bread, mostly because poverty but also health. I got down to 135lb and I was eating constantly. I think fasting, chewing more, and removing all sugars were the big helpers. Everyone is different. Experiment!

I don't eat sweet things. But I do eat bread, and some potatoes. I could cut those out. But from experience it won't matter much. I'll try the chewing thing I guess. And I'm due for a fast again. I'm sure if all the food was removed from my house I would be hungry but have no choice, so the weight would come off. I could probably do that too. But then I couldn't program gossip very effectively - my amygdala would interrupt me every few minutes, begging me to go eat something.

Try strict carnivore if you don’t want to be hungry. You can eat as much as you want, your body will struggle to overeat meat and fat and soon enough your portion sizes will come down - have to be strict on the no carbs part though which means having protein heavy snacks available like dried meats.

I just had another gout attack. Nope, I'm done with this. No more carnivore shit. My body cannot hack it. I've been skipping days. I didn't eat from Sunday dinner to Tuesday breaskfast. On Wednesday I only ate dinner and it was a ketogenic dinner. On Thursday I had bacon, lamb beans, salads. Then this morning I was fasting again whe the gout attack hit. Undoubtedly from the meat I ate yesterday. Most people should try carnivore but it is simply not for me. At least not in my current condition. I will have to lose weight the hard way.

When I did that, yeah. The only way I’ve found to lose weight without too much effort is eliminate all sugar and don’t bring many carbs in the house. Intermittent fasting, keto, carnivore are all great but take more effort. If I avoid sugar and empty carb BS, and I stay a little active, I’ll lose weight slowly. If I want to get shredded, I have to work way harder.

I can lose weight, I don't need advice for that part. But if I go below about 90kg then I get hunger (hollow stomach rumbles and amygdala interruptions of my concentration) which is difficult to tolerate with while programming a computer. I can't live well with that constant hunger. Being fit is nearly intolerable. It isn't a problem of getting there, it is a problem of being there. People have suggested that a carnivore diet or ketogenic diet prevents the hunger, but my body can't handle it right now. People have suggested that regular exercise fixes this too, and that is at least somewhat true, so I need to work out precisely how I'm going to do that given some situational hurdles. But it only helps to a limited degree, so there is a minimum weight that I can sustain without suffering and again I'm estimating that to be about 90kg. And my original point with this thread is that some people's bodies fight hard to maintain a certain minimum weight, and it's a genetic thing, and going below that is kind of like holding your breath... you can do it, but you'll give in eventually.