You have not explained why a vast population should mystically choose to eat 0.9 more cookies per day or to replace dancing with Netflix. Yet we see that something equivalent in effect has in fact happened.
And you are assuming a deeply unrealistic model in which each person exercises unlimited long-term control not only over specific behaviors (which are in fact hard to control), but over the total ensemble of all their actions. Not only are you assuming that a person can feasibly cause themselves to eat 0.9 fewer cookies per day for many years, but that, given that they have done so, they will also somehow prevent themselves from switching from dancing to Netflix without even noticing that they have made that switch.
Fair point that I didn’t include as much detail as I could.
My belief is that most people react to “the average weight went up over 20lbs between 1980 and 2010” with “wow that’s a lot, there must be something really weird going on we need a complex thesis with a scary name” but react to “the average calorie budget per day went up 200 calories” with “wow that’s it? I’d expect it to be more given, ya know, everything”.
My post was mostly just meant to put the magnitude of the change in perspective for them.
It would have taken me a lot longer than the 20 minutes I spent on the post if I wanted to find sources on the prevalence of low-satiety foods sedentary entertainment to talk about how they’re more common. I was trying to nail an effort:usefulness sweet spot
I think it’s interesting that you label protein and vegetables as high-satiety foods, when that just isn’t the case for me. Lean meats and veggies satiate me for longer than refined grains, but nor nearly as long as food higher in fat, as long as they’re relatively healthy fats (olive or avocado oil, grass fed butter and cream, cheese, nuts and seeds, things like that). That result definitely varies somewhat between people, but my experience isn’t out of the ordinary. Eating veggies or protein without fat just leaves me feeling full but unsatisfied, waiting until my stomach will let me eat more.
I agree with your point about the magnitude of the change. People didn’t suddenly start eating vastly more food after 1980. But that potentially cuts both ways: most of the other trends in diet and exercise were gradual and started much earlier, yet weight wasn’t increasing at a population level then. So why would slight reductions reverse the trend now, when slight increases didn’t generate it before? Why this recommend this specific slight intervention when so many other things have changed in our lives and environments, especially when you know that it just will come off as insulting to most people who’ve actually struggled to lose weight?
Yes, sometimes it is that simple. I know people who’ve just cut our soda and/or started walking for half an hour a day and lost tens of pounds in a year. And I’m glad for them! But not everyone’s body responds that way, and that’s kinda the point.
Edit to add: also, if the amount of calorie variation needed to lose 20 pounds really were as small as you say, at the level of a single cookie weighing less than 50 grams, then no, intuition for portion sizes would not be sufficient for controlling food intake, and you really would have to measure things. That would mean that being off by a teaspoon of oil when grilling a chicken breast in a pan each day is worth 5 pounds of body fat over time, and that’s just one part of one meal. Ditto for replacing a cup of strawberries with the same volume of apple or melon, or a cup of apple or melon with the same volume of banana—which are the kinds of things that over time just take way too much mindshare to keep up with for every single food decision, even for smart people who like math and measuring things.
You have not explained why a vast population should mystically choose to eat 0.9 more cookies per day or to replace dancing with Netflix. Yet we see that something equivalent in effect has in fact happened.
And you are assuming a deeply unrealistic model in which each person exercises unlimited long-term control not only over specific behaviors (which are in fact hard to control), but over the total ensemble of all their actions. Not only are you assuming that a person can feasibly cause themselves to eat 0.9 fewer cookies per day for many years, but that, given that they have done so, they will also somehow prevent themselves from switching from dancing to Netflix without even noticing that they have made that switch.
Fair point that I didn’t include as much detail as I could.
My belief is that most people react to “the average weight went up over 20lbs between 1980 and 2010” with “wow that’s a lot, there must be something really weird going on we need a complex thesis with a scary name” but react to “the average calorie budget per day went up 200 calories” with “wow that’s it? I’d expect it to be more given, ya know, everything”.
My post was mostly just meant to put the magnitude of the change in perspective for them.
It would have taken me a lot longer than the 20 minutes I spent on the post if I wanted to find sources on the prevalence of low-satiety foods sedentary entertainment to talk about how they’re more common. I was trying to nail an effort:usefulness sweet spot
I think it’s interesting that you label protein and vegetables as high-satiety foods, when that just isn’t the case for me. Lean meats and veggies satiate me for longer than refined grains, but nor nearly as long as food higher in fat, as long as they’re relatively healthy fats (olive or avocado oil, grass fed butter and cream, cheese, nuts and seeds, things like that). That result definitely varies somewhat between people, but my experience isn’t out of the ordinary. Eating veggies or protein without fat just leaves me feeling full but unsatisfied, waiting until my stomach will let me eat more.
I agree with your point about the magnitude of the change. People didn’t suddenly start eating vastly more food after 1980. But that potentially cuts both ways: most of the other trends in diet and exercise were gradual and started much earlier, yet weight wasn’t increasing at a population level then. So why would slight reductions reverse the trend now, when slight increases didn’t generate it before? Why this recommend this specific slight intervention when so many other things have changed in our lives and environments, especially when you know that it just will come off as insulting to most people who’ve actually struggled to lose weight?
Yes, sometimes it is that simple. I know people who’ve just cut our soda and/or started walking for half an hour a day and lost tens of pounds in a year. And I’m glad for them! But not everyone’s body responds that way, and that’s kinda the point.
Edit to add: also, if the amount of calorie variation needed to lose 20 pounds really were as small as you say, at the level of a single cookie weighing less than 50 grams, then no, intuition for portion sizes would not be sufficient for controlling food intake, and you really would have to measure things. That would mean that being off by a teaspoon of oil when grilling a chicken breast in a pan each day is worth 5 pounds of body fat over time, and that’s just one part of one meal. Ditto for replacing a cup of strawberries with the same volume of apple or melon, or a cup of apple or melon with the same volume of banana—which are the kinds of things that over time just take way too much mindshare to keep up with for every single food decision, even for smart people who like math and measuring things.