I have been on a calorie-restricted diet and lost I have 35 lbs so far (ibb.co/cwtCzf3) The only regret is not starting to take weight loss more seriously. One of the reasons I didn't take weight loss seriously much earlier is because I kept reading how extremely hard it is and how those who lose weight almost inevitable gain it back.
But in the last 6 months I've discovered how much easier it is that I thought (I eat whatever I want but keep it under 1600 cal/day and I substituted cauliflower rice for rice which cut down normal carb consumption by 50%). Telling people weight loss is extremely difficult is itself a major contributor to obesity.
I think part of the reason the "weight loss is nearly impossible" myth is so common is that the people who generate the most discussion of the topic are the people who keep trying and failing. People who try (or peddle) fad diets, people who have a temporary approach to dieting, people with truly terrible self-control... I suspect these are the people who hang out on weight loss forums and shape the views of magazine writers. A tiny, loud portion of the population can set public opinion if everyone else goes along with what they say.
Yes. The notable aspect of a steady weight loss plan through caloric restriction is finding habits that will curb our appetite (stopping foods that spike insulin, green tea in the morning etc). This then shapes how much cravings we have for carbs and sugar. These are sustainable practices. Rigorous weight loss techniques aren't sustainable and are not helping you form habits that control your appetite.
I think a lot of people set themselves up for failure by essentially planning to go back to their old habits. Many people say things like "I'm going to diet until I hit 140." Then they hit 140, or close enough, and "stop dieting." Then they regain the weight.
On the other hand, I've known other people that approached their diet from the perspective of "this is what I'll eat from now on." Those people, in my experience, keep the weight off for a long time. Some have kept it off for as long as I've known them, others only regained the weight when they wen through a life change that changed their relationship to their weight, like Richard said.
That's why you should weigh yourself every day and absolutely ignore anyone who says otherwise. if you want to weigh less than 140 pounds, stand on a digital scale every morning, and if the number on the scale is > 140, make choices that day accordingly.
You are 100% on point here, Richard, but you stop one step short in your analysis. Not only have we abandoned shaming, but we are moving in the polar opposite direction...accommodation. It's not enough that we no longer shame obesity or simply ignore it; we must accommodate them to make them as comfortable as possible in their poor choices.
What does she mean by protect? For one - "Provide accessible additional seats: All plus-size passengers should be provided with an extra free seat, or even two or three seats depending on their size, to accommodate their needs and ensure their comfort during the flight." Of course, taking up this (potentially) entire row of seats comes free of charge because the small seats violate the "rights" of the obese (is there is any more abused word in the English language than "rights" at this point?)
More egregiously, there is an organization called NAAFA, or the National Association to Fat Acceptance (https://naafa.org/). The NAAFA vision statement is: "We envision a culture where all fat people are free, celebrated, and liberated from every form of oppression." From my perspective, the only liberation the obese need is freedom from their poor choices.
I am writing a piece on this right now, which is why I had all this at my fingertips, but I promise you, the reality of this fat acceptance movement is far more entrenched and organized than people realize.
Holding your breath is under conscious control. Does that mean you can hold your breath until you suffocate? Not really. Our bodies (i.e., subcortical brain structures) are capable of exerting very strong pressure on our behavior in certain circumstances, regardless of what our conscious minds do/don't want to do. Of course, it's a matter of degree - hunger mechanisms are not as extreme as breathing/oxygen - but nonetheless, the comparison is useful. Having held your breath doesn't mean you know how to hold it until you suffocate. They're two different things. Likewise, being thin (or even formerly fat) doesn't mean you know what losing weight is like for most fat people.
There's discussion here of genetic/twin studies, but that's only a small portion of the science on fat/weight loss. Most of our caloric expenditure is due to our basal metabolic rate. After periods of substantial weight loss, humans' basal metabolic rate drops dramatically. Meanwhile hormones that produce hunger increase. Exercise burns calories, but then also produces a reduction in that basal metabolic rate. The "calories in/calories out" adage is true in a sense, but but elides these very important points.
Ultimately, the blame-fat-people perspective seems stuck in the "philosophy of fatness", rather than reaching the "science of fatness." I concede that being fat is not unchangeable in the same way race, etc. is. But that's really the wrong question. The question ought to be how effective are the interventions (dieting, exercise) that we're discussing. There have been dozens of studies of hundreds of thousands of people and the clear answer is "not very effective". Some people lose weight, but not very much. Most of those people who did lose weight regain most of it in the medium term. If you were studying a drug that worked that well (i.e., poorly) and presented it to the FDA, they'd look at you like you were crazy. Would you berate the patients in your study, telling them that they aren't using your drug correctly and that it would work if only they wanted it to sufficiently?
Similarly, the stronger case against fat shaming is that, for the outcome of weight loss, it works only to a small degree. In clinical research, the norm is to include balancing measures (undesirable outcomes that might be inadvertently be produced by the intervention and therefore undermine it's utility). For an intervention like fat shaming, mental distress would seem to be such an outcome and, indeed, the research literature shows that fat shaming works very well for producing mental distress. For a lot of people this outcome (very little weight loss, a lot of mental distress), is enough to make us not want to use fat shaming, though that is admittedly a values-dependent question.
Of course, this discussion also ought to be informed by recent research on drugs, such as tirzepatide, that actually CAN produce substantial weight loss (~40% of body weight) in randomized-controlled trials of obese people. It seems to work by targeting the hormonal mechanisms that work against weight loss more generally. I think if you consider this and other research findings, you can see why the attendees of the conference discussed in the NYT article don't lean into the "blame the fat people" line.
It's totally reasonable, in principle, to implement obesity interventions that ask for effort and behavior change of fat people, but to ignore both the broad findings of weight loss intervention studies (both the dismal results of diet and exercise based-interventions and the promising science of new classes of drugs) and the basic science research of the mechanisms underlying both, is, frankly, an unscientific approach. Unfortunately, it is a common perspective even among many of those trained in a scientific discipline.
I think the contention of the article is that things like dieting could be more effective if coupled by a regime of shaming; that shame could compound the massive amount of willpower that some people need to shift excess weight. This is the height of unscientific but think of cultures with an abundance of money and calories but few overweight people: Japan, Korea. These are very group-oriented cultures with a social taboo against becoming obese. Contrast with, for example, low-to-middle income cultures with an abundance of calories (but not money) and tons of overweight people: Nauru, to take an extreme example, or maybe Jordan/Saudi Arabia. These are also group-oriented cultures but have no such taboo. (Saudi Arabia also has no alcohol, which is interesting.)
I suspect shaming works rather better at preventing people from becoming fat in the first place. It's much easier to avoid gaining weight than to lose a large amount of it.
This is pretty much my view. Maintaining weight is an evolutionary priority that the body puts largely on automatic--if it weren't, you could starve to death in a surprisingly short period of time by consistently eating 50 calories a day too little.
All of us have set points that our bodies want to maintain. For most of us, those set points are above the socially desired level. If we are lucky, they are close enough to it that we can look good without exerting too much willpower. But if we aren't lucky, the effort required to stay in the socially acceptable range--or worse, the effort required to stay in the "not going to kill you quite young"--range is absolutely heroic.
Of course if you put obese folks in a WWII POW camp, they'd get skinny. But in a world with abundant food, the amount of mental effort they need to exert in order to keep their weight down is more than most humans can muster--their body floods them with hunger hormones, and also, their body drops their metabolism rate in an effort to get that weight back up, so they really can't eat much if they want to stay slim.
Folks who have kept really large amounts of weight off for years generally seem to have to follow unpleasant, exhausting routines: tiny amounts of food, massive amounts of exercise, all sorts of mental tricks to avoid their incessant, intrusive thoughts of hunger, and an absolutely rigid routine because one small slip--say, a cupcake at a birthday party--often triggers a cascade as their body joyously screams "Yes, we've found food, eat more, eat more!"
This is not really comparable to what I have to do to stay slim, which is "not eat dessert, and maybe do a little exercise". (I don't always hit that low bar, but it's a very different bar from "Weigh and log every ounce of food I eat so that I don't go over the 1200 calorie limit I'll be confined to for the rest of my life".)
Shaming those people more might enhance their willpower somewhat, but the gains seem to be marginal, and the costs are high. We have drugs that produce substantial weight loss with no obvious negative health effects. We have surgeries. Both have much better efficacy than shame and dieting, so we should use them, instead of the things that aren't working.
> if it weren't, you could starve to death in a surprisingly short period of time by consistently eating 50 calories a day too little
Is that really the case? A pound of fat contains about 4,000 calories, which means that eating 50 calories a day too little would burn through a pound in 80 days.
I'd be more inclined to agree with this theory, and do very much believe in free will and personal responsibility, however so much advice on nutrition is just dead wrong it's no wonder so many people are fat. My grandmother struggled with her weight and followed her doctors orders to drinks lots of skim milk and orange juice and eat margarine and 8-10 servings of grains and cereals per day. She was warned to avoid meat, eggs and full fat dairy. She took this advice continued to gain weight and collected chronic diseases until her early death.
A nutritionist I subscribe to decided to wear a blood sugar monitor for a week and follow the American Diabetic Society's meal plan recommendation from their website. His blood sugars constantly rose and crashed and his insulin was all over the place, and this was a metabolically healthy man! The plan would probably give you diabetes if you didn't have it already. This is why people believe diabetes is a chronic and progressive disease. If you follow the "experts" it most certainly is!
I'm a fledgling health coach and you'd be amazed how many out of shape people with chronic conditions follow their doctors orders meticulously then wonder why they are so hungry all the time and can't seem to lose the weight. The doctors orders are shite. And for God's sake people, STOP going low-fat raw vegan and then wondering why you have massive nutritional deficiences and your hair is falling out! You are not "detoxxing", you are dying! Sorry, I digress.
My point is that most health and nutrition guidelines are just wrong. Tufts University just came out with guidelines that stated Fruit Loops are more nutritious than scrambled eggs because the eggs contained cholesterol and the Fruit Loops were vitamin fortified. As if the supposed dietary dangers of cholesterol weren't debunked decades ago. Providing you aren't allergic to them and their sourced from an ethical farm (pastured chickens get better diets with insects, etc) eggs are practically the perfect food. Look for ones with bright orange yolks and thick, clear whites. It shoudn't come as a surprise that General Mills and Kelloggs were financial backers of the Tufts study.
So yes people need to get off their butts and walk, but from a nutrition standpoint their biggest enemy might be their propensity to listen to their doctor.
Can you link to the nutritionist with the blood sugar monitor? It's very alarming if true, but also suspicious because diabetes and blood sugar are some of the most solid areas of nutritional science.
I do generally agree with you that there's a lot of false information out there and the mainstream dietary advice was wrong for a long time.
The nutritionist I mentioned is behind a paywall as part of my health coaching certification course, but you can find a detailed breakdown of the ADA guidelines in the documentary "Fat Fiction" available on Amazon for rent. Check out around the 40 minute mark. Several dieticians and doctors discuss the diet, talk about how it doesn't work for their patients, and break down the nutritional data. (Surprise, it's about 75% simple carbohydrates.) It's facinating.
Ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes in 2021, I follow guidelines set out for me by a dietitian. I lost 50 pounds and not only is my blood sugar well-controlled, it’s gone back into the pre-diabetes range. Of course, I choose complex, high-fiber carbohydrates over simple, and I maintain a daily exercise regime.
Congratulations! That's great news. Exerecise is such an important part of the equation. I'm glad you are choosing healthy carbs. For many people, thier insulin resistance is such that they really need to avoid all grains and sugars and they don't see much progress on the recommended diet. If your previous diet had lots of processed food and sugar, however, the diet is a definite improvement, and if your insulin resistance isn't too far progressed, you can certainly can see progress as you have. I'm glad you found something that works for you.
Thank you! I am still going to watch the documentary you recommend to see where I may or should tweak my diet. The thought of living with diabetes scares the hell of me - possibly having a foot or leg lopped off or going blind or heart damage, you name it - so I guess that for me is the ultimate incentive to maintain a healthy weight,
Good points and Hanania’s failure to even mention the Food Industrial Complex shows that his libertarian tendencies are pushing him to ignore inconvenient evidence.
As a person who was obese most of my life, there was a point when it hit me hard that I needed to lose weight. I lost 180 pounds in my mid-forties and have kept most of it off now 15 years later. I can tell you from experience shaming only makes the person doing the shaming feel better about themselves. It does nothing for the other person. Shaming is a holier-than-thou attitude. Especially who that person has changed. Like when you lost the weight. You are not righteous in saying people should be shamed. I changed because I wanted it I was not shamed into it. In the article, you point out that you decided to change. Shaming you as a child or as an adult was not something you mentioned as a motivator.
Shaming does not stop racism, bigotry, or any other hate. We enact laws to take care of people who are wrong and hurt people.
My counterargument is that shaming is to social control as border collies are to herd control. It's not the tranquilizer rifle of a hunter, which can snipe an animal gone far astray. Rather, it prevents the animal from getting far away to begin.
Try shaming someone from My 600 lb Life and it will merely cause the shamee to feel bad and probably consume extra food to self-medicate.
Shame a young person who put on five extra pounds over winter break, on the other hand, and they will promptly change whatever bad habits they picked up in that period. This is how it works in Japan, I hear.
Shame serves some purpose at a societal level but yes, you 100% have to WANT it to lose weight. Want it badly enough that you value the results and are willing to put forth the effort. It does ultimately come from within
I would add that on top of everything else, our garbage food, and sedentary culture has certainly contributed to the fat epidemic, but it's only a contributing factor, not the sole driver of it. Also, it's a family culture of eating and not exercising, hence the recent appearance of "the fat family", which is when you see families of 2 parents and 2-3 kids, and everyone of them is fat, even the very young kids. Add a basic over-abundance of "food", and many just end up fat by default.
People should exercise, if they are interested in living longer, healthier lives, and attempts to normalize and de-stigmatize obesity isn't doing them any favors.
The abundance is one thing, but nobody ever got fat off an abundance of celery. Another contributing factor is that the science of satiety is a big thing: the likes of Doritos are seasoned and formulated in such a way to make each bite as delicious as the last, but no bite to be satisfying enough to stop. This certainly helps drive obesity.
However, other countries have Doritos too. Other countries also have abundant food and high incomes, like Japan and South Korea. Middle-income countries, too, offer plenty of scope for people to go through 2,000 calories in a single meal without spending much cash. But only some places have very high obesity, suggesting there's more to it than just the availability of junk food and calories. Social pressure, I am convinced, plays a big role. In places like France your friends will just flat-out tell you if you're looking flabby (and not in an approving way.)
I don't really buy the idea of genetics playing a decisive role across nations (though sure, I'll allow for some). Adopted Asian kids I've known in the US have probably been chunkier than the local average for whites in their economic class.
Peer pressure is real, but also in NE Asia they smoke, they walk, and their diets tend to center vegetables (in China/Korea's case) and seafood (in Japan's case). In addition to sashimi/sushi, Japanese will eat cooked fish practically unadorned, while we feel we have to fry it, cover it in butter, or shred it and load it with mayo.
Here's a fun map, China practically in a class by itself:
The US consumes more vegetables than one might guess, but that's because we eat so much of everything. Onions are our #1 which is a giveaway, since that's not exactly a vegetable you center a dish around but something that you're consuming on top of a burger, in deep-fried rings, or buried in some other dish, likely highly caloric.
Very interesting stuff! Thank you. Being ignorant of most of this topic, I think you are right. (I've always been fascinated at Japan's smoking rates, given their longevity and general low time-preference...) Got to say I'm surprised that onions outrank potatoes in the US. Wonder what percentage of it is the Bloomin' Onion™ and its derivatives?
I'm sure potato consumption exceeds that of onions -- for this purpose, potato isn't a vegetable but lumped in with cereal grains, which makes nutritional sense. Especially if, like so many, you don't eat the skin of the potato, which turns it into something a little closer to a vegetable. Of course if they're processed food, you're certainly not seeing that skin.
What I've been doing lately is making French fries in the air fryer, skin and all, with a light coating of ghee. I figure that's functionally equivalent to a baked potato with butter (at least if you can control the ketchup intake) but cooks faster and gets the kids to eat the potato skin.
The fact that everyone started simultaneously becoming more fat in the 1980s, and that introducing skinny natives/foreigners to an American diet reliably starts making them fatter, leads me to believe there is a biological component here.
I wouldn't be surprised if massive changes to our gut bacteria due to the use of things like Roundup, traces of different drugs in the water supply, and other things like that are significant contributors to the obesity epidemic. Processed food is clearly a culprit--I don't think I've ever seen a study where eliminating processed food didn't reduce weight and increase health to some extent.
I think where people make a mistake in shaming fat people is assuming that being skinny automatically makes you morally superior. I think what's more likely is that fat people have the same amount of willpower as the average person (on average! there are obviously exceptions), but are physically much hungrier, so they have to use more willpower to lose weight. Someone who remains skinny on a sh*t diet, using zero willpower and eating potato chips everyday, isn't morally superior to a fat person who tries really hard to diet and feels hungry 24/7 and gives in from time to time. If I eat whatever the f*** I want with no restrictions, no thoughtfulness, no attempts to be healthier or "eat right," I end up right on the border between a healthy BMI and an overweight BMI, maybe slightly overweight. It is physically impossible for me to eat enough to become obese. I just feel sick and stop. If someone is missing that feedback mechanism in their body, then they may need heroic amounts of willpower to stop being obese.
> fat people have the same amount of willpower as the average person (on average! there are obviously exceptions), but are physically much hungrier, so they have to use more willpower to lose weight.
Exactly. Technically we all have the ability to restrict food to the point where we are thin. But there is wide variation in how that feels. For some it’s effortless. For others it feels horrible, just constant gnawing hunger and obsessive thoughts about food.
A lot of people who are smug about being thin would cave immediately if they had to deal with that level of hunger while being expected to work and parent and function.
You had me until you started using your argument as an excuse for obesity. I shame fat people because I was fat (from an early age) and I put in the work to lose the weight and improve my health. I also quit a 30 yr 50 cigarette a day smoking habit which was far harder.
Basically quit blaming external circumstances and put in the work if after 2 yrs of that your still chunky then you get a pass.
When did I excuse obesity? I was talking about relative moral superiority. I don't put in much work re: diet or exercise, and I'm a normal/borderline BMI. I am not fat, and even when I was eating ice cream every day I was only slightly overweight, never obese. Ergo I realize I'm not morally superior to fat people who are trying and failing to lose weight, because it doesn't actually take effort for me to not be obese.
Well I'd probably peg you as skinny fat, but that's another thread. Its not really about what you look like as much as your health , skinny fat people and obese people have a similar internal health , just a different outward appearance.
As for not excusing obesity the paragraph going on about them "just being hungrier reads that way to me . Most obese people actually under eat then binge
My point is that obesity isn't necessarily due to a character flaw, any more than an IQ 70 person struggling to read has a character flaw.
Obviously people should do their best to be healthy, just like people should do their best to learn to read. But accomplishing a goal doesn't make you morally superior to someone who doesn't accomplish a goal. Moral superiority comes from the relative amount of effort you put forth.
Certainly it varies by individual but so does every indicator of potential. Language comes very easy to me; I don't have to study to excel in English. Math doesn't come easy to me; I have to study hard to excel in math.
Similarly some people might find adhering to social norms around, say, smoking, to be an imposition, while others might never have an impulse to smoke in the first place. Whether it's moral or not is less a concern than is compliance.
It is unfortunate that some of us have a steeper hill to climb to not be fat but if we carve out exceptions based on muh metabolism then the results are plain to see.
(No argument that our food production, while causing abundance, has certainly come with health costs, though.)
I agree with you. I just think that if someone who doesn't struggle with an issue spends a lot of time being sanctimonious/judgemental to someone else who struggles with it a lot, the shaming falls flat or even backfires.
That's fair. On an individual level that may well be true. People may get disheartened by being insulted, and they may find comfort in chips. (Couldn't be me!)
I suppose the question is whether a societal approach might ameliorate this a bit, particularly if it's framed as all of us being in it together, the battle with obesity.
I believe that being gay and being attracted to kids is largely genetic. When I try to bring that up with some people, they get all mad and say that I’m homophobic. Yet all I’m doing is stating scientific facts. The genetic fallacy is real with most people. They cannot separate “this thing is natural” with “this thing is good”.
The concordance rate for homosexuality among identical twins is low enough that if a homosexual has such a twin, it is most likely the case that the other twin is not a homosexual. Greg Cochran has a different theory for its etiology. I don't know of similar research into pedophilia.
Funny you're talking about shaming as a solution to obesity, while the culture has already moved on to lying about the poor health outcomes linked to obesity. In 10 years nobody will believe you when you say obesity is unhealthy! Well, nobody in normie lib spaces at least.
People hate living with the consequences of their actions, so they blame their circumstances on anything else, not willing to accept responsibility. Many such cases.
The typical screeching liberal activist might well be overweight, but they are basically losers. The average Met Gala attendee of the future will probably be leaner than ever thanks to weight-loss drugs.
I would bet liberals are, on average, much less obese than conservatives.
Several reasons they come down on the "not your fault" side of obesity (female activists promoting obesity as another marginalized identity, fat shaming being similar to bullying, etc.) So maybe another good example of Henderson's "luxury belief".
Yes -- presuming you mean *white* liberals when compared to white conservatives. Not sure if anyone has exact percentages, but these maps give a clue (white obesity lowest in Northeast and West Coast).
If you just compare obesity among Democrats vs. Republicans, then the racial element muddies things due to higher obesity rates among blacks and Hispanics, which might also partly explain the leftist view.
My observation is that beliefs like "you shouldn't shame people for being ugly" are only ever selectively applied. Literally no one can resist the urge to point out that someone they strongly dislike is fat, ugly, poorly-groomed, poorly-dressed, etc.
The case for "stigmatization" or "shaming" strikes me as being mostly about justifying cruel behavior. As you observe, people do not enjoy being shamed. A full utilitarian case for cruelty would consider these impacts on the victim. Your priors should be that being cruel to people harms them and you shouldn't do it for that reason, rather than asking everyone to engage in ad hoc probability games about whether a marginal increase in cruelty will incentivize a victim to improve their lifestyle. I would guess that something like 99% of cruel/shaming behavior causes more harm than it helps, in the case of obesity. I'm shocked that this isn't obvious to you.
I agree that the incentive structure in America is largely responsible for obesity but there are ways to
shift the incentive structure that don't involve actively advocating for and justifying cruelty.
> As mentioned above, the arguments against fat shaming strike me as odd because you could make the exact same arguments about crime, but almost no one says we should stop “shaming” rapists and murderers. Why exactly is this?
...Because being fat doesn't harm other people? I think there's a pretty obvious difference here.
During Covid, I saw numerous people arguing that it was selfish and anti-social not to get vaccinated, as failing to get vaccinated vastly increases one's likelihood of being hospitalised and using scarce medical resources which could be used by someone more needy.
"Not getting vaccinated" is just one example of a voluntary behaviour which vastly increases one's likelihood of being hospitalised. Most people are willing to bite the bullet and say that drug addicts, alcoholics and people who engage in risky sexual behaviour are also selfish and anti-social in this regard. And yet when it comes to obesity, the same people go quiet. (Worth mentioning that, aside from age, obesity was probably the single biggest risk factor for getting hospitalized for Covid if you contracted it - much more so even than one's relative risk if you chose not to get vaccinated.)
An obese person won't NECESSARILY end up in the hospital taking up scarce medical resources which could be used by someone more needy whose medical condition is completely outside of their control, but the person's obesity makes it more likely. If you think that being unvaccinated is selfish and anti-social under this framing, logically you should also think being obese is.
Also I think most of the arguments in favor of vaccination were about the *direct* positive impact it has on other people- preventing others from getting sick- rather than the indirect impact of overburdening the health system.
You were arguing that being obese doesn't hurt other people. My point is, if "not getting vaccinated" counts as "hurting other people", so does "being obese".
That's true, if health is publicly funded then people doing unsafe things are taking resources away others. But in that case we should also be shaming motorcycle riders, sports players, skydivers, etc. Using this logic to shame only fat people and not the other examples seems like some very selective reasoning.
No, I'm talking from a public messaging perspective.
Let's say you have a population of 10 million people, of whom 1 million people are obese and 1,000 at least once a year skydive. Let's say the annual risk of being hospitalised for obesity-related health conditions or skydiving-related accidents is 10%.
Let's say you do a big public service campaign intended to highlight the dangers of skydiving, which costs you $10 million. Even if that campaign convinces 20% of skydivers to stop skydiving forever, you've still only prevented 20 hospitalisations (200 skydivers, of whom 10% would have been hospitalised in a calendar year) - your public service campaign may not have broken even. By contrast, if you run a public service campaign intended to highlight the dangers of obesity, if it convinces 20% of obese people to change their diet and exercise habits, you've prevented 20,000 hospitalisations.
In fact, given the relative sizes of the two demographics, a public service campaign which only convinces 1% of obese people to change their lifestyles could well be more cost-effective than a public service campaign which convinces 20%, 50% or even 100% of skydivers.
The definition of choice is flawed. Saying something can be altered with incentives is merely saying outsiders can manipulate someone. That still isn't "choice".
As to the topic generally, anyone who looks at introduction and adoption of high fructose corn syrup into foods can see the correlation with obesity rates. Banning it would likely drop 20 lbs from each average American. It likely is the reason one can eat an identical diet and have the identical lifestyle in another part of the world and be 20 lbs lighter.
And that is not getting to the rest of the additives in American food that are banned elsewhere.
It is truly mind-boggling how much of our culture and politics is shaped by the desire to deny racial differences.
>As mentioned above, the arguments against fat shaming strike me as odd because you could make the exact same arguments about crime, but almost no one says we should stop “shaming” rapists and murderers. Why exactly is this?<
Perhaps not full-on rapists and murderers, but there is a clear and obvious desire among liberals not to shame criminals in general. And I think we all know where that impulse comes from. It is interesting that you note a lot of this "destigmatizing" started in the 1960s, which happens to coincide with some other major cultural changes around that same time. People adopted the "it isn't their fault" mentality instrumentally at first, in order to push the idea that racial differences don't exist, and the premise once accepted has now blossomed out into all sorts of different directions, such as the idea that people are "born gay" and that homosexuality is not a choice, the same with being "trans," and so forth and so on.
Exactly! Egalitarianism poisons everything. It destroys all values, distinctions, hierarchies, etc., including medical and psychiatric ones. There can't be mental illnesses if everyone's of equal value and potential ability/capacity. Race/ethnicity/sex/sexual orientation/class/ differences are all caused by irrational and unempirical prejudice. There are no genetic differences between groups that account for some/most of the massive variance in behavior and ability. Once you accept egalitarianism, wokeness becomes logically inevitable and undeniable as well as empirically unfalsifiable. Health differences are not immune to the same logic. Smoking and alcoholism are the only holdouts, I think, but they won't be for long.
1. Eating is highly emotional, and overeating can be a way to avoid one's problems. This generates addiction.
2. Diet high in processed foods, incl. corn syrup and vegetable oils. This junk is much less common in Europe, though Europeans still eat plenty of sugar, meat, fat, etc.
3. Over-medication. Americans are on loads of pharma drugs that cause weight gain, such as anti depressants.
4. Extreme sedentary lifestyle. I'm not talking about exercise...just walking. Europeans get their daily 10,000 steps, and 90 year olds live in 5th floor walk ups.
That said I'm against shaming and negative judgment. Much better to use positive incentives to create change.
I am a pretty stereotypical internet right-wing food weirdo. I won't eat seed oils, I rub vitamin K on my teeth straight after a cup of coffee etc. However, my view is that most obesity is because of extreme (and I mean really extreme) physical inactivity.
My reason for thinking this is because Ultra-Orthodox Jews eat the worst possible food, and lots of it, and while many are mildly overweight, few are really fat (closer to 1/100 than 1/10). They don't, typically, do much exercise either, and taking care of your body (for men) is not taken seriously at all. However, their lifestyle does mandate a minimum level of just getting off your butt, especially on Sabbath when all forms of transport except walking are off limits and you have to go to synagogue 3/4 times. Most importantly of all, though, is no TV (naughty ones have a laptop that they stash away and watch Netflix, but literally no-one has a TV in the living room where they can just veg out). People are naturally fidgety and want to move around unless you have a device that gives them regular dopamine hits for sitting down. In ultra-orthodox yeshivas, you notice that the the men are constantly getting up to do something because sitting down with a talmud is hard. The single most important thing you can do for the fatty in your life is take a baseball bat to their television. If they work at a computer, put a filter on it, not to block out porn (though that's good to), but so that when they get too bored to continue they find some excuse to get up.
I agree, with the caveat that the type of fat matters. Olive oil, animal fat good. Vegetable oil, trans fats, bad - highly inflammatory.
I was more thinking of the comparison to Europeans, who eat plenty of fast carbs and sugars, but don't eat very much processed foods. So I think there are important nuances.
Yes, absolutely agree with you on the choice/shaming issue and I've made the same comparison with the shaming of smokers. It's amazing how the medical establishment/media/popular culture is like, "smoking is horrible for you and if you smoke you're a bad person and a drain on the medical system" but completely turns a blind eye to obesity, not just the "normal" complications from obesity (heart disease, diabetes, etc) but especially during the COVID pandemic, where it was the #2 predictor for death from COVID behind age. We had magazines lauding "healthy at any weight" with the picture of a morbidly obese woman on the cover!!
“there was a very strong correlation between how much I ate and how much I weighed” haha. My guess is that fat people generally know they eat too much but just don’t want other people to remind them of that. I don’t know the biology of it, but once you’ve got fat, the body tries it’s best to keep it. As a former skinny, I know now just how hard it is to lose those extra pounds. My body seems to conspire with my appetite. I also know I could drop those pounds if I really really wanted to.
I have been on a calorie-restricted diet and lost I have 35 lbs so far (ibb.co/cwtCzf3) The only regret is not starting to take weight loss more seriously. One of the reasons I didn't take weight loss seriously much earlier is because I kept reading how extremely hard it is and how those who lose weight almost inevitable gain it back.
But in the last 6 months I've discovered how much easier it is that I thought (I eat whatever I want but keep it under 1600 cal/day and I substituted cauliflower rice for rice which cut down normal carb consumption by 50%). Telling people weight loss is extremely difficult is itself a major contributor to obesity.
I think part of the reason the "weight loss is nearly impossible" myth is so common is that the people who generate the most discussion of the topic are the people who keep trying and failing. People who try (or peddle) fad diets, people who have a temporary approach to dieting, people with truly terrible self-control... I suspect these are the people who hang out on weight loss forums and shape the views of magazine writers. A tiny, loud portion of the population can set public opinion if everyone else goes along with what they say.
Yes. The notable aspect of a steady weight loss plan through caloric restriction is finding habits that will curb our appetite (stopping foods that spike insulin, green tea in the morning etc). This then shapes how much cravings we have for carbs and sugar. These are sustainable practices. Rigorous weight loss techniques aren't sustainable and are not helping you form habits that control your appetite.
Nice work on the weight loss!
'Keeping the weight off is only 'hard' if you fall back into old habits'.
Well, yes. It's the 'not falling back into bad habits' which is the hard part.
I think a lot of people set themselves up for failure by essentially planning to go back to their old habits. Many people say things like "I'm going to diet until I hit 140." Then they hit 140, or close enough, and "stop dieting." Then they regain the weight.
On the other hand, I've known other people that approached their diet from the perspective of "this is what I'll eat from now on." Those people, in my experience, keep the weight off for a long time. Some have kept it off for as long as I've known them, others only regained the weight when they wen through a life change that changed their relationship to their weight, like Richard said.
That's why you should weigh yourself every day and absolutely ignore anyone who says otherwise. if you want to weigh less than 140 pounds, stand on a digital scale every morning, and if the number on the scale is > 140, make choices that day accordingly.
You are 100% on point here, Richard, but you stop one step short in your analysis. Not only have we abandoned shaming, but we are moving in the polar opposite direction...accommodation. It's not enough that we no longer shame obesity or simply ignore it; we must accommodate them to make them as comfortable as possible in their poor choices.
A perfect example is this NY Post piece about an obese travel blogger who has kicked off a change.org campaign to "Demand for the FAA to Protect Plus-Size Travelers." https://nypost.com/2023/04/15/plus-sized-airline-jaelynn-chaney-demands-free-seats-in-petition-to-faa/
What does she mean by protect? For one - "Provide accessible additional seats: All plus-size passengers should be provided with an extra free seat, or even two or three seats depending on their size, to accommodate their needs and ensure their comfort during the flight." Of course, taking up this (potentially) entire row of seats comes free of charge because the small seats violate the "rights" of the obese (is there is any more abused word in the English language than "rights" at this point?)
More egregiously, there is an organization called NAAFA, or the National Association to Fat Acceptance (https://naafa.org/). The NAAFA vision statement is: "We envision a culture where all fat people are free, celebrated, and liberated from every form of oppression." From my perspective, the only liberation the obese need is freedom from their poor choices.
I am writing a piece on this right now, which is why I had all this at my fingertips, but I promise you, the reality of this fat acceptance movement is far more entrenched and organized than people realize.
The slippery slope from tolerance/accommodation to forced emotional validation has become more like a cliff post-2020.
We do more than accommodate -- we celebrate obesity.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/seattle-hosts-biggest-fat-celebration-year-generate-fat-joy-promote-fat-liberation
Holding your breath is under conscious control. Does that mean you can hold your breath until you suffocate? Not really. Our bodies (i.e., subcortical brain structures) are capable of exerting very strong pressure on our behavior in certain circumstances, regardless of what our conscious minds do/don't want to do. Of course, it's a matter of degree - hunger mechanisms are not as extreme as breathing/oxygen - but nonetheless, the comparison is useful. Having held your breath doesn't mean you know how to hold it until you suffocate. They're two different things. Likewise, being thin (or even formerly fat) doesn't mean you know what losing weight is like for most fat people.
There's discussion here of genetic/twin studies, but that's only a small portion of the science on fat/weight loss. Most of our caloric expenditure is due to our basal metabolic rate. After periods of substantial weight loss, humans' basal metabolic rate drops dramatically. Meanwhile hormones that produce hunger increase. Exercise burns calories, but then also produces a reduction in that basal metabolic rate. The "calories in/calories out" adage is true in a sense, but but elides these very important points.
Ultimately, the blame-fat-people perspective seems stuck in the "philosophy of fatness", rather than reaching the "science of fatness." I concede that being fat is not unchangeable in the same way race, etc. is. But that's really the wrong question. The question ought to be how effective are the interventions (dieting, exercise) that we're discussing. There have been dozens of studies of hundreds of thousands of people and the clear answer is "not very effective". Some people lose weight, but not very much. Most of those people who did lose weight regain most of it in the medium term. If you were studying a drug that worked that well (i.e., poorly) and presented it to the FDA, they'd look at you like you were crazy. Would you berate the patients in your study, telling them that they aren't using your drug correctly and that it would work if only they wanted it to sufficiently?
Similarly, the stronger case against fat shaming is that, for the outcome of weight loss, it works only to a small degree. In clinical research, the norm is to include balancing measures (undesirable outcomes that might be inadvertently be produced by the intervention and therefore undermine it's utility). For an intervention like fat shaming, mental distress would seem to be such an outcome and, indeed, the research literature shows that fat shaming works very well for producing mental distress. For a lot of people this outcome (very little weight loss, a lot of mental distress), is enough to make us not want to use fat shaming, though that is admittedly a values-dependent question.
Of course, this discussion also ought to be informed by recent research on drugs, such as tirzepatide, that actually CAN produce substantial weight loss (~40% of body weight) in randomized-controlled trials of obese people. It seems to work by targeting the hormonal mechanisms that work against weight loss more generally. I think if you consider this and other research findings, you can see why the attendees of the conference discussed in the NYT article don't lean into the "blame the fat people" line.
It's totally reasonable, in principle, to implement obesity interventions that ask for effort and behavior change of fat people, but to ignore both the broad findings of weight loss intervention studies (both the dismal results of diet and exercise based-interventions and the promising science of new classes of drugs) and the basic science research of the mechanisms underlying both, is, frankly, an unscientific approach. Unfortunately, it is a common perspective even among many of those trained in a scientific discipline.
I think the contention of the article is that things like dieting could be more effective if coupled by a regime of shaming; that shame could compound the massive amount of willpower that some people need to shift excess weight. This is the height of unscientific but think of cultures with an abundance of money and calories but few overweight people: Japan, Korea. These are very group-oriented cultures with a social taboo against becoming obese. Contrast with, for example, low-to-middle income cultures with an abundance of calories (but not money) and tons of overweight people: Nauru, to take an extreme example, or maybe Jordan/Saudi Arabia. These are also group-oriented cultures but have no such taboo. (Saudi Arabia also has no alcohol, which is interesting.)
I suspect shaming works rather better at preventing people from becoming fat in the first place. It's much easier to avoid gaining weight than to lose a large amount of it.
This is pretty much my view. Maintaining weight is an evolutionary priority that the body puts largely on automatic--if it weren't, you could starve to death in a surprisingly short period of time by consistently eating 50 calories a day too little.
All of us have set points that our bodies want to maintain. For most of us, those set points are above the socially desired level. If we are lucky, they are close enough to it that we can look good without exerting too much willpower. But if we aren't lucky, the effort required to stay in the socially acceptable range--or worse, the effort required to stay in the "not going to kill you quite young"--range is absolutely heroic.
Of course if you put obese folks in a WWII POW camp, they'd get skinny. But in a world with abundant food, the amount of mental effort they need to exert in order to keep their weight down is more than most humans can muster--their body floods them with hunger hormones, and also, their body drops their metabolism rate in an effort to get that weight back up, so they really can't eat much if they want to stay slim.
Folks who have kept really large amounts of weight off for years generally seem to have to follow unpleasant, exhausting routines: tiny amounts of food, massive amounts of exercise, all sorts of mental tricks to avoid their incessant, intrusive thoughts of hunger, and an absolutely rigid routine because one small slip--say, a cupcake at a birthday party--often triggers a cascade as their body joyously screams "Yes, we've found food, eat more, eat more!"
This is not really comparable to what I have to do to stay slim, which is "not eat dessert, and maybe do a little exercise". (I don't always hit that low bar, but it's a very different bar from "Weigh and log every ounce of food I eat so that I don't go over the 1200 calorie limit I'll be confined to for the rest of my life".)
Shaming those people more might enhance their willpower somewhat, but the gains seem to be marginal, and the costs are high. We have drugs that produce substantial weight loss with no obvious negative health effects. We have surgeries. Both have much better efficacy than shame and dieting, so we should use them, instead of the things that aren't working.
> if it weren't, you could starve to death in a surprisingly short period of time by consistently eating 50 calories a day too little
Is that really the case? A pound of fat contains about 4,000 calories, which means that eating 50 calories a day too little would burn through a pound in 80 days.
I'd be more inclined to agree with this theory, and do very much believe in free will and personal responsibility, however so much advice on nutrition is just dead wrong it's no wonder so many people are fat. My grandmother struggled with her weight and followed her doctors orders to drinks lots of skim milk and orange juice and eat margarine and 8-10 servings of grains and cereals per day. She was warned to avoid meat, eggs and full fat dairy. She took this advice continued to gain weight and collected chronic diseases until her early death.
A nutritionist I subscribe to decided to wear a blood sugar monitor for a week and follow the American Diabetic Society's meal plan recommendation from their website. His blood sugars constantly rose and crashed and his insulin was all over the place, and this was a metabolically healthy man! The plan would probably give you diabetes if you didn't have it already. This is why people believe diabetes is a chronic and progressive disease. If you follow the "experts" it most certainly is!
I'm a fledgling health coach and you'd be amazed how many out of shape people with chronic conditions follow their doctors orders meticulously then wonder why they are so hungry all the time and can't seem to lose the weight. The doctors orders are shite. And for God's sake people, STOP going low-fat raw vegan and then wondering why you have massive nutritional deficiences and your hair is falling out! You are not "detoxxing", you are dying! Sorry, I digress.
My point is that most health and nutrition guidelines are just wrong. Tufts University just came out with guidelines that stated Fruit Loops are more nutritious than scrambled eggs because the eggs contained cholesterol and the Fruit Loops were vitamin fortified. As if the supposed dietary dangers of cholesterol weren't debunked decades ago. Providing you aren't allergic to them and their sourced from an ethical farm (pastured chickens get better diets with insects, etc) eggs are practically the perfect food. Look for ones with bright orange yolks and thick, clear whites. It shoudn't come as a surprise that General Mills and Kelloggs were financial backers of the Tufts study.
So yes people need to get off their butts and walk, but from a nutrition standpoint their biggest enemy might be their propensity to listen to their doctor.
Can you link to the nutritionist with the blood sugar monitor? It's very alarming if true, but also suspicious because diabetes and blood sugar are some of the most solid areas of nutritional science.
I do generally agree with you that there's a lot of false information out there and the mainstream dietary advice was wrong for a long time.
The nutritionist I mentioned is behind a paywall as part of my health coaching certification course, but you can find a detailed breakdown of the ADA guidelines in the documentary "Fat Fiction" available on Amazon for rent. Check out around the 40 minute mark. Several dieticians and doctors discuss the diet, talk about how it doesn't work for their patients, and break down the nutritional data. (Surprise, it's about 75% simple carbohydrates.) It's facinating.
https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Fiction-Dr-Mark-Hyman/dp/B0868535QR/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1UG45AY7Z4VL5&keywords=fat+documentary&qid=1682018003&sprefix=fat+documentary%2Caps%2C81&sr=8-3
Ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes in 2021, I follow guidelines set out for me by a dietitian. I lost 50 pounds and not only is my blood sugar well-controlled, it’s gone back into the pre-diabetes range. Of course, I choose complex, high-fiber carbohydrates over simple, and I maintain a daily exercise regime.
Congratulations! That's great news. Exerecise is such an important part of the equation. I'm glad you are choosing healthy carbs. For many people, thier insulin resistance is such that they really need to avoid all grains and sugars and they don't see much progress on the recommended diet. If your previous diet had lots of processed food and sugar, however, the diet is a definite improvement, and if your insulin resistance isn't too far progressed, you can certainly can see progress as you have. I'm glad you found something that works for you.
Thank you! I am still going to watch the documentary you recommend to see where I may or should tweak my diet. The thought of living with diabetes scares the hell of me - possibly having a foot or leg lopped off or going blind or heart damage, you name it - so I guess that for me is the ultimate incentive to maintain a healthy weight,
Good points and Hanania’s failure to even mention the Food Industrial Complex shows that his libertarian tendencies are pushing him to ignore inconvenient evidence.
As a person who was obese most of my life, there was a point when it hit me hard that I needed to lose weight. I lost 180 pounds in my mid-forties and have kept most of it off now 15 years later. I can tell you from experience shaming only makes the person doing the shaming feel better about themselves. It does nothing for the other person. Shaming is a holier-than-thou attitude. Especially who that person has changed. Like when you lost the weight. You are not righteous in saying people should be shamed. I changed because I wanted it I was not shamed into it. In the article, you point out that you decided to change. Shaming you as a child or as an adult was not something you mentioned as a motivator.
Shaming does not stop racism, bigotry, or any other hate. We enact laws to take care of people who are wrong and hurt people.
My counterargument is that shaming is to social control as border collies are to herd control. It's not the tranquilizer rifle of a hunter, which can snipe an animal gone far astray. Rather, it prevents the animal from getting far away to begin.
Try shaming someone from My 600 lb Life and it will merely cause the shamee to feel bad and probably consume extra food to self-medicate.
Shame a young person who put on five extra pounds over winter break, on the other hand, and they will promptly change whatever bad habits they picked up in that period. This is how it works in Japan, I hear.
Case-in-point, they don't start interventions by shaming the subject, they start by encouraging them and convincing them that they are loved.
Losing 180lb sounds amazing (I lost 60lb once and still regard it as my finest achievement). Was that about half your body weight?
Shame serves some purpose at a societal level but yes, you 100% have to WANT it to lose weight. Want it badly enough that you value the results and are willing to put forth the effort. It does ultimately come from within
I would add that on top of everything else, our garbage food, and sedentary culture has certainly contributed to the fat epidemic, but it's only a contributing factor, not the sole driver of it. Also, it's a family culture of eating and not exercising, hence the recent appearance of "the fat family", which is when you see families of 2 parents and 2-3 kids, and everyone of them is fat, even the very young kids. Add a basic over-abundance of "food", and many just end up fat by default.
People should exercise, if they are interested in living longer, healthier lives, and attempts to normalize and de-stigmatize obesity isn't doing them any favors.
The abundance is one thing, but nobody ever got fat off an abundance of celery. Another contributing factor is that the science of satiety is a big thing: the likes of Doritos are seasoned and formulated in such a way to make each bite as delicious as the last, but no bite to be satisfying enough to stop. This certainly helps drive obesity.
However, other countries have Doritos too. Other countries also have abundant food and high incomes, like Japan and South Korea. Middle-income countries, too, offer plenty of scope for people to go through 2,000 calories in a single meal without spending much cash. But only some places have very high obesity, suggesting there's more to it than just the availability of junk food and calories. Social pressure, I am convinced, plays a big role. In places like France your friends will just flat-out tell you if you're looking flabby (and not in an approving way.)
Genetics is important in explaining the thinness of North-East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans), I think.
Sure, I believe it. I wonder if that also contributed to their social pressure. "Why are you fat when it's so easy to be thin?"
I don't really buy the idea of genetics playing a decisive role across nations (though sure, I'll allow for some). Adopted Asian kids I've known in the US have probably been chunkier than the local average for whites in their economic class.
Peer pressure is real, but also in NE Asia they smoke, they walk, and their diets tend to center vegetables (in China/Korea's case) and seafood (in Japan's case). In addition to sashimi/sushi, Japanese will eat cooked fish practically unadorned, while we feel we have to fry it, cover it in butter, or shred it and load it with mayo.
Here's a fun map, China practically in a class by itself:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/vegetable-consumption-per-capita
The US consumes more vegetables than one might guess, but that's because we eat so much of everything. Onions are our #1 which is a giveaway, since that's not exactly a vegetable you center a dish around but something that you're consuming on top of a burger, in deep-fried rings, or buried in some other dish, likely highly caloric.
Very interesting stuff! Thank you. Being ignorant of most of this topic, I think you are right. (I've always been fascinated at Japan's smoking rates, given their longevity and general low time-preference...) Got to say I'm surprised that onions outrank potatoes in the US. Wonder what percentage of it is the Bloomin' Onion™ and its derivatives?
I'm sure potato consumption exceeds that of onions -- for this purpose, potato isn't a vegetable but lumped in with cereal grains, which makes nutritional sense. Especially if, like so many, you don't eat the skin of the potato, which turns it into something a little closer to a vegetable. Of course if they're processed food, you're certainly not seeing that skin.
What I've been doing lately is making French fries in the air fryer, skin and all, with a light coating of ghee. I figure that's functionally equivalent to a baked potato with butter (at least if you can control the ketchup intake) but cooks faster and gets the kids to eat the potato skin.
Great points; All true as well.
The fact that everyone started simultaneously becoming more fat in the 1980s, and that introducing skinny natives/foreigners to an American diet reliably starts making them fatter, leads me to believe there is a biological component here.
I wouldn't be surprised if massive changes to our gut bacteria due to the use of things like Roundup, traces of different drugs in the water supply, and other things like that are significant contributors to the obesity epidemic. Processed food is clearly a culprit--I don't think I've ever seen a study where eliminating processed food didn't reduce weight and increase health to some extent.
I think where people make a mistake in shaming fat people is assuming that being skinny automatically makes you morally superior. I think what's more likely is that fat people have the same amount of willpower as the average person (on average! there are obviously exceptions), but are physically much hungrier, so they have to use more willpower to lose weight. Someone who remains skinny on a sh*t diet, using zero willpower and eating potato chips everyday, isn't morally superior to a fat person who tries really hard to diet and feels hungry 24/7 and gives in from time to time. If I eat whatever the f*** I want with no restrictions, no thoughtfulness, no attempts to be healthier or "eat right," I end up right on the border between a healthy BMI and an overweight BMI, maybe slightly overweight. It is physically impossible for me to eat enough to become obese. I just feel sick and stop. If someone is missing that feedback mechanism in their body, then they may need heroic amounts of willpower to stop being obese.
> fat people have the same amount of willpower as the average person (on average! there are obviously exceptions), but are physically much hungrier, so they have to use more willpower to lose weight.
Exactly. Technically we all have the ability to restrict food to the point where we are thin. But there is wide variation in how that feels. For some it’s effortless. For others it feels horrible, just constant gnawing hunger and obsessive thoughts about food.
A lot of people who are smug about being thin would cave immediately if they had to deal with that level of hunger while being expected to work and parent and function.
You had me until you started using your argument as an excuse for obesity. I shame fat people because I was fat (from an early age) and I put in the work to lose the weight and improve my health. I also quit a 30 yr 50 cigarette a day smoking habit which was far harder.
Basically quit blaming external circumstances and put in the work if after 2 yrs of that your still chunky then you get a pass.
When did I excuse obesity? I was talking about relative moral superiority. I don't put in much work re: diet or exercise, and I'm a normal/borderline BMI. I am not fat, and even when I was eating ice cream every day I was only slightly overweight, never obese. Ergo I realize I'm not morally superior to fat people who are trying and failing to lose weight, because it doesn't actually take effort for me to not be obese.
Well I'd probably peg you as skinny fat, but that's another thread. Its not really about what you look like as much as your health , skinny fat people and obese people have a similar internal health , just a different outward appearance.
As for not excusing obesity the paragraph going on about them "just being hungrier reads that way to me . Most obese people actually under eat then binge
My point is that obesity isn't necessarily due to a character flaw, any more than an IQ 70 person struggling to read has a character flaw.
Obviously people should do their best to be healthy, just like people should do their best to learn to read. But accomplishing a goal doesn't make you morally superior to someone who doesn't accomplish a goal. Moral superiority comes from the relative amount of effort you put forth.
Certainly it varies by individual but so does every indicator of potential. Language comes very easy to me; I don't have to study to excel in English. Math doesn't come easy to me; I have to study hard to excel in math.
Similarly some people might find adhering to social norms around, say, smoking, to be an imposition, while others might never have an impulse to smoke in the first place. Whether it's moral or not is less a concern than is compliance.
It is unfortunate that some of us have a steeper hill to climb to not be fat but if we carve out exceptions based on muh metabolism then the results are plain to see.
(No argument that our food production, while causing abundance, has certainly come with health costs, though.)
I agree with you. I just think that if someone who doesn't struggle with an issue spends a lot of time being sanctimonious/judgemental to someone else who struggles with it a lot, the shaming falls flat or even backfires.
That's fair. On an individual level that may well be true. People may get disheartened by being insulted, and they may find comfort in chips. (Couldn't be me!)
I suppose the question is whether a societal approach might ameliorate this a bit, particularly if it's framed as all of us being in it together, the battle with obesity.
I believe that being gay and being attracted to kids is largely genetic. When I try to bring that up with some people, they get all mad and say that I’m homophobic. Yet all I’m doing is stating scientific facts. The genetic fallacy is real with most people. They cannot separate “this thing is natural” with “this thing is good”.
The concordance rate for homosexuality among identical twins is low enough that if a homosexual has such a twin, it is most likely the case that the other twin is not a homosexual. Greg Cochran has a different theory for its etiology. I don't know of similar research into pedophilia.
Excellent essay.
Funny you're talking about shaming as a solution to obesity, while the culture has already moved on to lying about the poor health outcomes linked to obesity. In 10 years nobody will believe you when you say obesity is unhealthy! Well, nobody in normie lib spaces at least.
People hate living with the consequences of their actions, so they blame their circumstances on anything else, not willing to accept responsibility. Many such cases.
The typical screeching liberal activist might well be overweight, but they are basically losers. The average Met Gala attendee of the future will probably be leaner than ever thanks to weight-loss drugs.
I would bet liberals are, on average, much less obese than conservatives.
Several reasons they come down on the "not your fault" side of obesity (female activists promoting obesity as another marginalized identity, fat shaming being similar to bullying, etc.) So maybe another good example of Henderson's "luxury belief".
Yes -- presuming you mean *white* liberals when compared to white conservatives. Not sure if anyone has exact percentages, but these maps give a clue (white obesity lowest in Northeast and West Coast).
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/prevalence-maps.html#race
If you just compare obesity among Democrats vs. Republicans, then the racial element muddies things due to higher obesity rates among blacks and Hispanics, which might also partly explain the leftist view.
My observation is that beliefs like "you shouldn't shame people for being ugly" are only ever selectively applied. Literally no one can resist the urge to point out that someone they strongly dislike is fat, ugly, poorly-groomed, poorly-dressed, etc.
The case for "stigmatization" or "shaming" strikes me as being mostly about justifying cruel behavior. As you observe, people do not enjoy being shamed. A full utilitarian case for cruelty would consider these impacts on the victim. Your priors should be that being cruel to people harms them and you shouldn't do it for that reason, rather than asking everyone to engage in ad hoc probability games about whether a marginal increase in cruelty will incentivize a victim to improve their lifestyle. I would guess that something like 99% of cruel/shaming behavior causes more harm than it helps, in the case of obesity. I'm shocked that this isn't obvious to you.
I agree that the incentive structure in America is largely responsible for obesity but there are ways to
shift the incentive structure that don't involve actively advocating for and justifying cruelty.
I'm surprised Richard didn't call fat people "low IQ".
> As mentioned above, the arguments against fat shaming strike me as odd because you could make the exact same arguments about crime, but almost no one says we should stop “shaming” rapists and murderers. Why exactly is this?
...Because being fat doesn't harm other people? I think there's a pretty obvious difference here.
During Covid, I saw numerous people arguing that it was selfish and anti-social not to get vaccinated, as failing to get vaccinated vastly increases one's likelihood of being hospitalised and using scarce medical resources which could be used by someone more needy.
"Not getting vaccinated" is just one example of a voluntary behaviour which vastly increases one's likelihood of being hospitalised. Most people are willing to bite the bullet and say that drug addicts, alcoholics and people who engage in risky sexual behaviour are also selfish and anti-social in this regard. And yet when it comes to obesity, the same people go quiet. (Worth mentioning that, aside from age, obesity was probably the single biggest risk factor for getting hospitalized for Covid if you contracted it - much more so even than one's relative risk if you chose not to get vaccinated.)
An obese person won't NECESSARILY end up in the hospital taking up scarce medical resources which could be used by someone more needy whose medical condition is completely outside of their control, but the person's obesity makes it more likely. If you think that being unvaccinated is selfish and anti-social under this framing, logically you should also think being obese is.
Sure, hypocrites exist. What's your point?
Also I think most of the arguments in favor of vaccination were about the *direct* positive impact it has on other people- preventing others from getting sick- rather than the indirect impact of overburdening the health system.
You were arguing that being obese doesn't hurt other people. My point is, if "not getting vaccinated" counts as "hurting other people", so does "being obese".
Obesity is not contagious.
That's true, if health is publicly funded then people doing unsafe things are taking resources away others. But in that case we should also be shaming motorcycle riders, sports players, skydivers, etc. Using this logic to shame only fat people and not the other examples seems like some very selective reasoning.
Sure, but what percentage of the population is obese vs. routinely skydives or rides a motorbike?
How is that relevant? Does the morality of an action depend on its frequency?
No, I'm talking from a public messaging perspective.
Let's say you have a population of 10 million people, of whom 1 million people are obese and 1,000 at least once a year skydive. Let's say the annual risk of being hospitalised for obesity-related health conditions or skydiving-related accidents is 10%.
Let's say you do a big public service campaign intended to highlight the dangers of skydiving, which costs you $10 million. Even if that campaign convinces 20% of skydivers to stop skydiving forever, you've still only prevented 20 hospitalisations (200 skydivers, of whom 10% would have been hospitalised in a calendar year) - your public service campaign may not have broken even. By contrast, if you run a public service campaign intended to highlight the dangers of obesity, if it convinces 20% of obese people to change their diet and exercise habits, you've prevented 20,000 hospitalisations.
In fact, given the relative sizes of the two demographics, a public service campaign which only convinces 1% of obese people to change their lifestyles could well be more cost-effective than a public service campaign which convinces 20%, 50% or even 100% of skydivers.
And again, how is any of that relevant? This article and comment thread are about individual shaming, not the best way to spend public health dollars.
The definition of choice is flawed. Saying something can be altered with incentives is merely saying outsiders can manipulate someone. That still isn't "choice".
As to the topic generally, anyone who looks at introduction and adoption of high fructose corn syrup into foods can see the correlation with obesity rates. Banning it would likely drop 20 lbs from each average American. It likely is the reason one can eat an identical diet and have the identical lifestyle in another part of the world and be 20 lbs lighter.
And that is not getting to the rest of the additives in American food that are banned elsewhere.
It is truly mind-boggling how much of our culture and politics is shaped by the desire to deny racial differences.
>As mentioned above, the arguments against fat shaming strike me as odd because you could make the exact same arguments about crime, but almost no one says we should stop “shaming” rapists and murderers. Why exactly is this?<
Perhaps not full-on rapists and murderers, but there is a clear and obvious desire among liberals not to shame criminals in general. And I think we all know where that impulse comes from. It is interesting that you note a lot of this "destigmatizing" started in the 1960s, which happens to coincide with some other major cultural changes around that same time. People adopted the "it isn't their fault" mentality instrumentally at first, in order to push the idea that racial differences don't exist, and the premise once accepted has now blossomed out into all sorts of different directions, such as the idea that people are "born gay" and that homosexuality is not a choice, the same with being "trans," and so forth and so on.
Exactly! Egalitarianism poisons everything. It destroys all values, distinctions, hierarchies, etc., including medical and psychiatric ones. There can't be mental illnesses if everyone's of equal value and potential ability/capacity. Race/ethnicity/sex/sexual orientation/class/ differences are all caused by irrational and unempirical prejudice. There are no genetic differences between groups that account for some/most of the massive variance in behavior and ability. Once you accept egalitarianism, wokeness becomes logically inevitable and undeniable as well as empirically unfalsifiable. Health differences are not immune to the same logic. Smoking and alcoholism are the only holdouts, I think, but they won't be for long.
1. Eating is highly emotional, and overeating can be a way to avoid one's problems. This generates addiction.
2. Diet high in processed foods, incl. corn syrup and vegetable oils. This junk is much less common in Europe, though Europeans still eat plenty of sugar, meat, fat, etc.
3. Over-medication. Americans are on loads of pharma drugs that cause weight gain, such as anti depressants.
4. Extreme sedentary lifestyle. I'm not talking about exercise...just walking. Europeans get their daily 10,000 steps, and 90 year olds live in 5th floor walk ups.
That said I'm against shaming and negative judgment. Much better to use positive incentives to create change.
I am a pretty stereotypical internet right-wing food weirdo. I won't eat seed oils, I rub vitamin K on my teeth straight after a cup of coffee etc. However, my view is that most obesity is because of extreme (and I mean really extreme) physical inactivity.
My reason for thinking this is because Ultra-Orthodox Jews eat the worst possible food, and lots of it, and while many are mildly overweight, few are really fat (closer to 1/100 than 1/10). They don't, typically, do much exercise either, and taking care of your body (for men) is not taken seriously at all. However, their lifestyle does mandate a minimum level of just getting off your butt, especially on Sabbath when all forms of transport except walking are off limits and you have to go to synagogue 3/4 times. Most importantly of all, though, is no TV (naughty ones have a laptop that they stash away and watch Netflix, but literally no-one has a TV in the living room where they can just veg out). People are naturally fidgety and want to move around unless you have a device that gives them regular dopamine hits for sitting down. In ultra-orthodox yeshivas, you notice that the the men are constantly getting up to do something because sitting down with a talmud is hard. The single most important thing you can do for the fatty in your life is take a baseball bat to their television. If they work at a computer, put a filter on it, not to block out porn (though that's good to), but so that when they get too bored to continue they find some excuse to get up.
I agree, with the caveat that the type of fat matters. Olive oil, animal fat good. Vegetable oil, trans fats, bad - highly inflammatory.
I was more thinking of the comparison to Europeans, who eat plenty of fast carbs and sugars, but don't eat very much processed foods. So I think there are important nuances.
Yes, absolutely agree with you on the choice/shaming issue and I've made the same comparison with the shaming of smokers. It's amazing how the medical establishment/media/popular culture is like, "smoking is horrible for you and if you smoke you're a bad person and a drain on the medical system" but completely turns a blind eye to obesity, not just the "normal" complications from obesity (heart disease, diabetes, etc) but especially during the COVID pandemic, where it was the #2 predictor for death from COVID behind age. We had magazines lauding "healthy at any weight" with the picture of a morbidly obese woman on the cover!!
“there was a very strong correlation between how much I ate and how much I weighed” haha. My guess is that fat people generally know they eat too much but just don’t want other people to remind them of that. I don’t know the biology of it, but once you’ve got fat, the body tries it’s best to keep it. As a former skinny, I know now just how hard it is to lose those extra pounds. My body seems to conspire with my appetite. I also know I could drop those pounds if I really really wanted to.