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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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I recently (and by recently, I mean two weeks ago) started water fasting, and to displace the constant feelings of food cravings I started watching food-related videos, most notably: TLC's 600lb Life. It is extraordinarily trashy TV, but illuminating.

Before I describe the negative observations, here's the positive ones: A) All of the successful patients had a good attitude to begin with (they wanted to lose the weight, and were willing to commit) B) They followed the doctor's instructions (important.) C) They had friends and family who were supportive and were generally affable individuals to begin with (likeable!)

As a representative slice of the people who get really, really fat, they're about 5% of the population. The rest that follows is the generalizations of everyone else.

Now. For the hot takes:

THE OBESE ARE IGNORANT

Do you remember the much-maligned food pyramid from your health classes, the one that put way too many grain carbs at the bottom? At the very least, it puts vegetables on the second tier, and fast food at the very tippy top. And these people don't even know that. The very concept of CICO they stubbornly defy. They don't seem to know anything about basic nutrition that even a kid would know. And it's not like they're getting fat off good cuisine, either. (A fat gourmand with a diverse palette would be, at the very least, a good friend to have to ask for recommendations.) They're just eating fast-food slop paid by their welfare checks. And speaking of...

THE OBESE ARE ENTITLED

There is a certain childlike narcissism that accompanies each and every one of these patients, that demands the world bend around them: that they should be fed, bathed, and cared after without giving anything back in return. They frequently manipulate their family members and spouses to look after them, hand and foot, even their children. They're rude and throw tantrums, and their ignorance only strengthens their stubbornness. (They even disagree with their own doctor, a man they're self-selected to seek out!) They continue their bad eating habits - even in the hospital itself! - and have food snuck in for them to eat. This inevitably leads to...

THE OBESE ARE STUPID

In wrestling, where the tiers are segmented by weight class, in order to hit the weight limits, athletes often go to extraordinarily lengths to temporarily lose 5-10 pounds before weigh-in to get as much of an advantage as they can. In the show, in order to qualify for bariatric surgery, patients need to lose a certain amount of weight so that it is safe for them to go into surgery. Now, admittedly, going to 1200 calorie diet when you're used to 10k+ is pretty hard, but even going to 5,000 - twice the amount of a healthy adult - would guarantee weight loss without significant dietary changes, other than portions.

Do they do this? Of course not.

In fact, I'm pretty sure they don't even weigh themselves beforehand. It's always a surprise and a shock when - surprise of surprises - that eating the same amount as you did before would maintain it. (In fact, some of them even gained weight.) The tantrums, the lies, the threats - all are laid bare before the uncaring measure of the livestock scale.

Of course they don't get the surgery. And they're always left wondering why, the poor buggers.

So, in conclusion, I have come into belief that you should judge people for being obese. Not to say that all fat people are ignorant, entitled, and stupid. But they definitely have at least one of these traits, and should be avoided at all costs.

I wonder if there's a vicious cycle here, where low intelligence or conscientiousness makes people more prone to overeating initially, and obesity leads to further cognitive decline.

I'm in the fat shaming as a form of public health camp but I do sympathize with the morbidly obese. I think we need to adopt Japanese habits if we want to save people from becoming obese in the first place.

But if someone is already obese I believe they're likely irreversibly damaged wrt regulating their own weight.

At my heaviest I hit 260 pounds. Through a moderate amount of discipline I can keep it parked between 210 and 220. Through extreme dieting I can get down to 190 but then I can't stop thinking about food and lose my shit and relapse.

My doctor suggested I would ideally be between 170-180 and that seems impossible tbh.

I have to imagine those set points scale linearly; if I ever hit as much as 400 pounds for whatever reason, my moderate effort would only ever get me down to 320 at most and falling below that would be unsustainable effort.

This is probably the best one can hope for as not ignorant, not entitled and not stupid and it's not great.

I am of the opinion that the reason why Western cuisine sucks is that one is not allowed to enjoy it: that the foods one gravitates to when in a hurry are the ones most laden in sugars and fats and carbs. Satiety, in my opinion, is a function of digestion.

If you are making the effort to curb it, you're already ahead of the pack. You are probably one or two dietary/lifestyle changes away from maintaining at two hundred pounds (which still isn't great, but better than the median American.)

If you're prone to snacking, I can heartily recommend a popcorn machine (which, with the addition of popcorn salts, makes for a better snack than other fare.) Granted, if you slather butter and oils over it it defeats the point, but it's just an example of a thing you can do.

I love that the Motte has broached this subject. If you're not familiar with comedian Justin Whitehead, his whole shtick is essentially watching My 600 Pound Life and tearing into the people who appear on it. Not a particularly admirable way to get laughs, but it's a guilty pleasure: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4GLent9Zk6E

He went viral a while ago when a big guy started following him through a Walmart, knew who he was, ending in a confrontation in the parking lot.

Did he walk away, or did he have to get up to a jog?

No one jogged. They yelled at each other by Justin's car.

Firstly, you are judging an entire group of people on the basis of reality tv - something I wouldn't recommend anyone do at the best of times. People on reality TV are hand picked to get viewers eyes, not for showing reality. Imagine if I judged everyone from New Jersey based on Jersey Shore.

So I will lay my cards on the table and say I am obese and probably fall under the "morbidly obese" category.

I am not ignorant: I know fully well about the food pyramid. I know how to count calories. I understand nutrition basics fairly well, how to read nutrition information, etc. I eat fast food maybe once a week before tabletop night and eat out once a week for date night. Other than that either I or my wife cook our meals - and we eat well - last night was tomato artichoke bisque soup with a croque monsieur. The night before was pan fried walleye with a chickpea and avocado salad. I admittedly have a more peasant palette than my wife, but she's really taught me how to cook better tasting and healthier meals.

I am not entitled: While I am married, I am fully capable of taking care of myself and could live alone without issue. I take a shower every day. I work a fulltime job and have a healthy career. I have two hobbies which require at least some level of activity (fishing and woodworking). I walk my dogs several miles multiple times a week to make sure they stay healthy and at the appropriate weight (irony, I'm aware). I try to make sure I am never taking too much room anywhere I am and try to constantly stay alert for anyone who needs to move by me.

I am not stupid: I am fully aware my biggest hurdle is portion size control. I'm not happy being fat, but clearly I am actively making the decision to continue being so as I have helping sizes that are too large. Now, I'm not looking to get any surgeries for weight loss, and am otherwise in pretty good health - but I also know being in good health is only temporary and I am a time bomb waiting to happen.

So why am I replying? Sympathy? No. I don't deserve sympathy. I've made my own poor choices and that is entirely on me.

Maybe for some sort of understanding. Everyone has their vice: alcohol addictions, affairs, drugs, video games, porn, etc. I wear my vice in public every day; you and everyone else can see my vice on me. That fit person walking down the street that beats their spouse everyday and is a functional alcoholic? You would never know their vices without getting to know them, and maybe not even then. Does that excuse me being overweight? Of course not. I'm trying to fix it; I've failed in the past and may fail for the rest of my life, but I'm still going to try.

I don't want special accommodations.
I don't really care if people think worse of me because I am overweight: I think worse of me for being overweight.
I hate the "healthy at any size" movement and its derivatives.
All I would like to do is point out some of us overweight people don't fall into how you are observing a reality TV show.

My weight has fluctuated 30-ish pounds over the last few years. (24-29 BMI, but semi-muscular. 24 would be ideal)

Nothing affects weight like stress. When things are stable, I find myself steadily losing 2 pounds/month until I settle around a 25 BMI.

But, stability is hard to find. I've changed 4 cities in 2 years & 10 cities in 10 years. There's immigration insecurity, loan payments, familial responsibilities & relationship tensions that can vanish for a few hours....if I allow myself to order fries. I'm no picky eater either. I'm actually an expert cook. But, when everything piles up, I just don't have anything left to give. And fries, fries taste so so good.

some sort of understanding

I like that phrasing. Understand that I know everything I 'should do' if I want to lose weight. But life doesn't happen in isolation. "I have a lot going on right now" is a good enough answer.

I don't want special accommodations.
I don't really care if people think worse of me because I am overweight: I think worse of me for being overweight.
I hate the "healthy at any size" movement and its derivatives.
All I would like to do is point out some of us overweight people don't fall into how you are observing a reality TV show.

100%

I think I owe you a apology.

I threw out a lot of hot flak into a sensitive topic and your reply was too heartfelt not to make a response.

We should all try to overcome our vices. It is truly a struggle that never ends.

I wish you the best of luck in overcoming yours.

And although I don't think I've quite changed my mind, I will endeavor to be more understanding in the future.

For the offense I've given you, I'm sorry.

You're fine but I do appreciate the apology even though I don't feel it is truly needed. I'm not offended, I just wanted to speak about something I actually understand since I normally lurk as most of the time the topics are more eloquently covered by others.

There are absolutely overweight people who are stupid, ignorant, or entitled. Reality TV will be highlighting these people as it is more dramatic than just an otherwise well-put together person who can't overcome eating too large of portions because it would be boring as hell.

But at the end of the day, it was my poor choices that brought me here and only better choices will get me out of it. I deserve being looked down on for those poor choices; it just isn't through stupidity, ignorance, or entitlement - just weakness in the face of a vice.

I deserve being looked down on for those poor choices...

Yes! But also no. I think that the thing which people consistently get wrong (in both directions) about obesity is whether or not it should be shameful. IMO the correct answer is "yes, but not any more than we shame all the other vices".

We all have some vice or other that we struggle to overcome. Every single person on this earth is flawed and has to fight past those flaws on a regular basis. I try to give grace to my raging alcoholic brother in law because I know that fundamentally, I'm not that much different than he is - I just have a different vice (like you, I also struggle with my eating habits greatly). But I also don't excuse him (or myself) for our poor choices either.

So, you have to strike a balance between the two extremes here, or it's not just. There's a Bible verse I'm fond of which says "all have sinned, and all have fallen short of the glory of God". I like it because it reminds me of two equally important things. First, I'm flawed, and second, everyone is just as flawed as me. So while I need to work to get better, I also shouldn't feel like I'm uniquely bad. Which is why I agree that you deserve to be looked down upon in the sense that you have serious flaws, you also don't in the sense that others have flaws just as serious in other areas.

Absolutely, I think your views here are matching my own.

In my post I was leaning more into my acknowledgement that my vice is not good or healthy, it is something that deserves at least some shame by me. This was because of the beliefs espoused by the OP as well as the "healthy at any size" / "anti-fatphobia" activists; I was looking to distance myself from them and show the OP that my current state does deserve at least some contempt. I did try and bring in the fact that it is a vice like many others, as you bring up, though one that is always visible to everyone unlike almost every other vice as a way to help them better contextualize how I think fat people should be viewed.

I think a lot of what you’re seeing— at least the parts that aren’t exaggerated for TV — are evidence of food addiction. Sugar, simple carbs, fat, and salt trigger the reward centers of your brain. And if you do so often enough, you’ll become at least mildly addicted. And the stuff they’re doing absolutely looks like any other addiction— lying, denial, manipulation. This can happen with things like screens, obviously drugs, alcohol. They don’t think they’re doing it too much, they’re in control, and they want other people to help them.

This is something I think needs to be addressed in general. I’m not convinced people are aware just how psychologically addicted you can get to food. And like any other addiction, if you’re not dealing both with the addiction and the psychological symptoms that got you addicted in the first place, it’s almost impossible to sustain the diet and lifestyle changes that you are making. You don’t get to 600 lbs and a cattle scale by having a normal relationship with food. I’d be surprised if there’s no underlying trauma that they’re treating with the dopamine rush that their food is providing.

You can't quit eating food, but you can quit eating some foods and replace them with others. And some foods are much easier to overeat than others.

I totally agree. I tend to find that as I choose the least processed version of whatever I’m eating, my ability to overeat goes down. Choose a baked potato over fries. Most people can easily down a supersized fries, but I don’t think you could eat the equivalent in a baked potato. It would be two medium sized potatoes. Same with a burger. If it’s not a highly processed one, it’s going to take less to satisfy you.

Imagine instead of food someone is addicted to cigarettes. This is easy to imagine, many people are. Imagine still that its you who are addicted to smoking; who knows, maybe you actually are or have been.

So you decide that smoking is slowly killing you and you need to quit. You get together with a doctor that helps with this and your family is on board with helping etc. So far so good.

Now imagine that, while you have a great deal of motivation and support to quit smoking, it turns out that you actually need to smoke 2-3 cigarettes a day or your will die.

Food addiction is the only addiction that can never be totally abstained from. From your first days of life at your mothers breast, to the feeding tube in the hospice, man must eat or perish. Every other person is always also eating around you every day. There are massive advertising campaigns displaying savory foods to you everywhere you turn. People love talking about food. The government subsidizes it heavily.

Which feels more difficult? Asking a smoker or drug addict to never use their drug ever again? Or asking them to only get a little bit high a reasonable number of times?

I mean I totally agree with all of that, but I think there’s another huge problem in the sense that nobody, or very few people, seem willing to say that you can absolutely become addicted to food. The dominant idea is that it’s totally under rational control, under the premise that when you choose food you’re perfectly capable of choosing properly and that no other influences are at play. Or that the dominant reason people eat is because they are biologically hungry and therefore have no need to develop coping strategies or deal with underlying mental issues or traumatic experiences or bad coping mechanisms. In fact, quite often well meaning people tend to teach food as a cope. Giving a kid a lollipop after a painful injection is sort of teaching kids that the way to handle an unpleasant experience is to then treat yourself to sweets or food in general. And that’s just a one off. Sometimes you teach kids to do the same when it comes to any unpleasant experiences— eat something and feel better.

And as you mentioned, ads are everywhere. But even more, food itself (at least in the USA) is everywhere. Every public venue has food and drink available. Even public parks often have vending machines selling chips and cookies and sodas. Stores, even those where there’s no obvious connection to food, like hardware stores and craft stores always stock the chips, sodas, and cookies right next to the checkout. Imagine that for the smoker. Every place he goes, he sees cigarettes for sale, cheaply, and not even in a way that he has to ask for them or look for them. Just ready to be picked up and smoked.

I think until we really get the level of crisis and are willing to acknowledge just how addictive foods, especially those that are highly processed, can be, the public health crisis of obesity isn’t going to change. The psychological part has to be a part of this. If the women are using food to cope with something, that cannot change until you deal with that something which might be a really serious psychological issue like being an abuse or rape survivor.

Imagine that for the smoker. Every place he goes, he sees cigarettes for sale, cheaply, and not even in a way that he has to ask for them or look for them. Just ready to be picked up and smoked.

That's how it used to be for smokers, until at least the 1990s.

It would seem to me that, if this is true (and, for the record, I believe it probably is), then all of the pablum around "marijuana isn't addictive but it might kind-of-sort-of be habit forming" is just total bullshit and marijuana is absolutely addictive.

However, that's only a question if we're still arguing in the year 2000.

The higher concentrations of THC now mean marijuana is unquestionably not only addictive but an actively dangerous drug that can cause psychotic breaks in single use scenarios.

iTs jUSt a pLanT!

I mean, pot not being addicted is easily falsifiable- you just have to find somebody who's addicted to it. This not being particularly hard, even if it doesn't represent the median user, says something about it.

Food addiction is very real.

I've gone cold turkey on things before. Alcohol, sex, masturbation, porn, internet, reddit, video games, etc. Of all of them going cold turkey on sugar was the absolute hardest thing I've ever done. And unlike quitting most of those things it remains difficult to continue.

I found with most addictions there there is a one to two week hump where your brain is resetting and still craving the thing you want. If you can make it through that one to two week hump you are usually fine. With sugar that hump was more like a month. Probably because my body can still produce it from other things I'm eating, so unless you are literally starving to death for two weeks you can't go full cold turkey on sugar.

The other unique difficulty I've had is what I call "food depression". Its usually when I start getting a little bit hungry, but not hungry enough to desire any of the foods I'm supposed to eat. Or it happens when I'm shopping and go down an isle with a bunch of forbidden foods. I get overcome with an extreme sense of sadness and loss. I've been on the verge of tears.

I always have to just wait it out. Its either real hunger, and I'll be hungry enough in an hour to eat the healthy thing. Or its just a craving and it will go away and I won't be hungry in an hour.

One oddly helpful thing is having young children. I can usually see in real-time how much hunger and food impacts their moods, and its made me far more aware of my own hunger and mood connections. Especially when that connection is negative and harmful.

I want to preface this comment by saying that I think addiction/habituation mechanisms of sugar are still not all that well studied scientifically and that I don't think there is strong scientific evidence for almost any recommendation here. That is, unlike some of my other comments on the general topic area, which are strongly backed by large bodies of published research, this comment is indulging in some mere speculation.

One thing I tried long long ago, in a location far far away from where I currently live, was a weird recommendation that I saw on the internet before I really had any sense of any of the science in these worlds. A quick search doesn't show up any real science for it, only mostly returning results for one study that basically does nothing to actually support the hypothesis. Anyway, the idea was to have one small piece of chocolate basically immediately after you woke up in the morning. The idea was that your reward circuits aren't reared up to go nuts over sugar at that time, so it would be sort of 'training' your brain to think that sugar is less rewarding in general, which could reduce cravings later in the day. I did it, and it seemed to kinda help, but again, totally anecdote and no science. It could have even been somewhat harmful, but overtaken by other changes in my life at the time.

Another thing that I've heard from medical folks like Peter Attia, but haven't gone to look if there is any good science, is to pay attention to the time concentration of consumption. That is, you can down a glass of orange juice or sugary beverage super quickly, and that gives a massively concentrated rush in a way that doesn't happen by, say, getting about the same amount of sugar in the time that it takes to eat that sugar in apple form. (He actually talked about having a continuous glucose monitor and spoke about different foods causing different kinds of spikes; I recall him saying that basically the biggest, quickest spike he ever saw was something like raisins that were coated in some yogurt or candy or something that he had on an airplane.) After getting married, the wife is a big fan of fruits, and I definitely eat more of them now than I used to. Still not a lot, and I definitely can't binge on fruit the way I used to binge on various sugary products wayyyy back in the day. There is some intuitive plausibility to something like this if you think about comparisons to nicotine. There seems to be pretty significant differences in addictiveness of nicotine rushes from smoking/vaping compared to slower delivery mechanisms like gums/lozenges/patches. Again, I haven't taken the time to see if there is any not-bad science here.

I will also note that I don't remember the timeline of how long I had cravings after I got 'off sugar'. But now that most of it comes from fruits or the occasional single piece of chocolate after dinner, I absolutely notice a difference if I go to an event and have basically a 'whole dessert'. I'll likely have some minor cravings the next day, but they go away pretty quickly.

That blood sugar level spike is the glycemic index. I believe most people would benefit by eating more foods that are lower glycemic index. Which approximates to the obvious advice of avoiding simple carbs, but with some counterintuitive foods that are surprisingly high or low. Sweet fruits that don't spike your blood sugar that much, etc.

That blood sugar spike and following crash is not good for our moods or satiation. And also makes your body release lots of insulin.

And I hope this is real rather than yet another fake understanding of nutrition from the raggedy and untrustworthy discipline of nutrition science.

There was a flurry of activity trying to make glycemic index do a bunch of things. I don't recall much conclusive coming out of it. For particular questions of addiction/rewards pathways, I don't think the work really got very far out of the stage of some basic theoretical mechanism conjectures. I also haven't followed up enough to see if any of them were busted by empirics.

FWIW, when I lost my weight, many years ago, I did so by following the "GI Diet" which basically recommends you eat mostly low-GI foods. The theory being that it would reduce sugar spikes and regulate your metabolism. Of course it also just happens to mean you are eating mostly lower carb and low sugar foods, and to some degree I suspect any reasonably healthy diet combined with exercise will work.

"Small piece of chocolate" (like one or two of the tiny squares; 10% of a bar) after a meal that might not be immediately satiating seems to result in fewer net calories for me than eating more of whatever I was having for lunch; a bit of a 'one weird trick' but maybe the (small) blood sugar bump is helping here?

The obvious difference between food and other addictions is that you cannot go cold turkey on all food. At least not without dying. The common recommendation for recovered addicts to never engage with the thing they got addicted to again, even in moderation, cannot apply to food.

The obvious difference between food and other addictions is that you cannot go cold turkey on all food.

It is actually theoretically possible to quit by going cold turkey. At least if you start morbidly obese. To be clear I am not recommending it, but the canonical case was Angus Barbieri. He supposedly lost 276 lbs, and kept most of it off, at least at the five year follow up.

There is some clinical research on protein-sparing modified fasts, which seems to be more sound from a physiological point of view. In early research there was a realitvely high incidence of death, possibly from mismanagement of the amino-acid profile or (preexisting?) heart disease. It seems like it would probably be hard to get an institutional review board to go along with a large scale study now, hard to fund a high quality study, and you would have perpetual problems with compliance.

From the applied side, this is something like what competitive bodybuilders have been doing in the last weeks of contest prep for some time. That is a world known for disordered eating, so I only point this out to say that it works physiologically, not that it's necessarily a good idea.

It can’t apply to food if you’re talking about all food, but I think it can sort of apply to the kind of highly processed foods and high glycemic index foods that seem to be the worst. Maybe you can’t cut all carbs. Okay cool. But you can do something like Paleo or Keto or something similar. Like instead of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, make the same thing at home using as close to natural ingredients as possible. Use lean beef, good quality cheese, a whole grain bun, etc. and really, I think that burger would probably taste better anyway. Substitute fries for baked potatoes. And on it would go.

Like instead of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger

Which is ~450 calories. You could eat a McDonald's double cheeseburger as your 3 meals a day and lose weight. And since I remember what I used to make it, the last burger I prepared at home (albeit not with your ingredient list suggestion, the beef was pre-packaged refrigerated patty, not from mince, though nutritionally it would be near-identical) was instead 480 calories.

Short of directly eating blocks of lard, there is no specific food item that can be responsible for the 600lb outcomes that OP describes. It instead requires an inordinate quantity of food. That it's more likely to be McDonalds instead of homemade burgers has more to do with the general dysfunction that you require to hit 600lb, rather than because McDonalds is better than the equivalent amount of homemade burgers at making you 600lb.

I mean part of the issue is that people can eat that and a large fries in a single meal. I think if you did the whole food version you’d feel full much faster. Which would definitely help to keep your weight reasonable.

Well, also french fries and a large coke are likely more calories than what you would eat and drink with it at home. I'm guessing potato chips and a single can of soda.

God. It would probably be delicious, but it would take forever, and probably cost more. I’d be a lot healthier if I developed better habits around cooking and meal prep.

I mean I'm too tired to cook sometimes too, but when I am (and don't want to order pizza or something) a cheeseburger is exactly what I make:

  1. Slap 1/3-1/4 lb of beef in hot pan or on grill; squish with flipper
  2. Cut bun; spread some mustard/mayo/butter/whatever on there
  3. Slice cheese and onion
  4. Turn beef; squish a little more and put cheese on it
  5. Wait 2 mins
  6. Put onion slice on bottom of bun
  7. Put beef on onion
  8. Put some lettuce on beef
  9. Put top of bun on lettuce

This seems like way less work than going to McDonalds, and takes less than ten minutes? If you want fries with that you need to think ahead and plug the deep frier in ~15 minutes before starting the above and add "0. Throw fries in deep frier" to your steps. Cutting up a potato first is fast enough for me (and much healthier), but those frozen fries work fine if you want to optimize for speed.

(EDIT: I see downthread you are vegan (but still think cheeseburgers are delicious), so substitute one of those frozen patties for the beef stuff and don't use butter -- even easier, and the black-bean ones are pretty good (although almost but not quite entirely unlike a burger))

You can make the case with the burger but the deep frier part is not plausible. Cleaning up a deep frier and the fine mist of oil it will deposit all over your kitchen are a lot of work, there are substantial efficiencies of scale for deep frying.

Also keep in mind that getting in a comfy car and driving to McDonald's and back doesn't register as work to most people in the same way that cooking and especially cleaning dishes do.

You can make the case with the burger but the deep frier part is not plausible. Cleaning up a deep frier and the fine mist of oil it will deposit all over your kitchen are a lot of work, there are substantial efficiencies of scale for deep frying.

Wat? It lives in the pantry and I bring it out if I want fries; if you're mostly doing potatoes the oil only needs changing from time to time. I deep clean it maybe annually.

The thing has a lid; there's no 'mist', fine or otherwise. Are you thinking of an industrial unit? You are correct that this would be a bad idea -- the $50 Walmart ones work fine for domestic quantities.

More comments

It's mostly start-up costs. Admittedly, the start-up costs are high; we got 'lucky' in that wife wasn't allowed to work for a while during the immigration process, so she bore a lot of those costs while unemployed. We kept a spreadsheet of recipes; I usually did the calorie counts. But once you have the recipe and have done the calorie count once, it's done forever. (You also don't have to do this right away if it's not an important goal; you can always just go do it later, since you have all the information just sitting there anyway.)

Actual cooking time can really vary. We have a mix, with some recipes that are pretty quick and easy to make; honestly, many of these take less time than I would have taken to go out of my way, fight through traffic that always seems to get worse, stop by a drive-thru, wait through what always seemed to be a longer and longer line, and then still have to wait for it to be prepped. Just a burger and fries? Easy peasy, honestly takes almost no time. Maybe 15-20min of cook time for the fries, and you do the burger while they cook. Even faster if you're just microwaving a baked potato. There's a ton of really simple meals, like throwing together a salad or making some spaghetti (purchased frozen meatballs are an easy starter), and legit, I'm probably saving time over running to a drive thru.

Up to this point, you don't even need much "meal prep"; you just need meal planning, so that you can pick up all your groceries for the week in one stop rather than having to constantly run out to the store to get that one thing you're missing.

Getting more into meal prep, with a little time and effort, you can start freezing things to have some 'ready made' stuff that just needs reheating for days when you have no time. We'll have more extravagant recipes that we'll make on some weekend that we're going to be home anyway (winter is fantastic, especially because the cooking keeps the house warm), and we'll just make a double/triple/whatever batch (depending on calorie counts and how many portions we're wanting), bag it up, freeze it, and bam, we've got ten meals that we can just pull out and reheat over the next few months. Family size matters for what is plausible. If you're not a big family, you can bang out twenty days worth (or more) of lunches/dinners in a long afternoon. A freezer helps, so you don't have to eat the same thing every day for a week, which is what a lot of meal preppers do. But we'll also sometimes do, say, a casserole or roast or chicken that we'll just eat for three days in a row or whatever. That maybe takes more time than if you're stopping by Chipotle and buying enough food once to have it sit in your fridge and eat on for three days... but probably less than stopping by Chiptole every day and buying individual meals each day.

Now, once a week, one of us goes through the recipes and picks some for the following week. Can take into account if we know we have some work thing or whatever and put something super easy on those days. Then, since the actual recipes are right there, make a grocery list. That whole process maybe takes 20min now, tops. We often do it between sets while we're at the gym, so it doesn't even take up what would otherwise be productive time. I spend wayyyy more time writing stupid comments on TheMotte than I do on almost any of this.

Costs are a big question mark; it really depends on what you want. We've definitely culled some recipes that were good and tasty, but not so good and tasty that they justified the cost. If you want everything artisanal and fancy, sure, you can rack up the dollar signs. But when you're making it yourself, you really can tailor it to what you want, and for an equivalent quality, you're almost always saving (or for equivalent cost, you're almost always getting better quality). I will absolutely put a cheap American cheese slice on my homemade double cheesey until the day they ban it; nothing else melts quite like it; fight me.

It definitely changes your relationship with restaurants, though. So many times, when we do end up in a restaurant, there's like half the menu that would just pain me to order, thinking, "MFer, I can put Alfredo sauce on some pasta for like a buck o' five; why would I pay you fifteen for it?!" Restaurants now are mostly for being social, when traveling, for an experience, for some international dishes that are kind of a pain to get/keep the ingredients, or for some dishes that genuinely do have a significantly higher home prep cost/difficulty (I may or may not be finally close to cracking sushi well enough; this was always one of our few 'always worth just picking some up' meals).

Since I feel like I need a closer, I will just remind you that the start-up costs are absolutely high, and you will probably feel very very frustrated for a while. But like with most things in life (exercising, taking up a new sport/hobby, buying a house for the first time, hell, being married, etc.), it does get easier. You can try to ease into it, too; don't feel like you need a brand new recipe and make every meal yourself every day for three months; just plan to substitute some number of meals a week to start and hopefully be fine with repeating some things as you're building a repertoire. One last thing that also helped my wife is that I always assured her that if something went horribly wrong with a new recipe, we can always just go pick something up/order something in/pull out a frozen pizza or something; it's not the end of the world. Thankfully, we only had to do that a handful of times.

As an aside, any chance of posting some of those recipes in the Wednesday thread? I'm beginning to get heavy into meal prep, and could use the inspiration.

Batch cooking is an honest revelation, especially with automation like ovens, crock pots, rice cookers, or sous vide rigs. When I'm doing well I can meal prep for 3 days with about 3 hours end to end, of which maybe 30 minutes is actual touch time and the rest is watching a movie waiting for food to cook. That gets me very whole foods that are honestly pretty boring, but there's a whole universe of price points for effort vs outcome. You could do a week's worth of giant 1000-calorie burritos in 90 minutes end to end, I bet.

I’d be interested in a writeup. I know it’s possible in theory, but I’m a lazy son of a bitch, and haven’t made a plan.

Also, this forum will probably skewer me for this, but I keep a vegan kitchen. So lots of the common minimal-prep sources of protein are off the table. C’est la vie.

Oof. Good on you for following your ethics, but that is harder. I can only speak for my own situation, I hope it helps as a sketch:

I'm designing food supplies for 3 days, which lines up neatly with integer bulk quantities of food I can buy. I'm targeting 1800-2000 calories a day, 150-200 grams protein, about 300 grams carbs, the balance is fats. My level of talent and energy to invest is minimal. My 3-day buy is:

  • 5 pounds of boneless skinless chicken breast, usually packaged as 6 breasts. This can flex between 4.5 and 6 pounds, which lets me easily buy from what's in the cooler.
  • 5-pound bag of russet potatoes.
  • 2-pound (? Maybe just 1) bag of rainbow carrots.
  • Enough broccoli heads to end up with about 1.5lb of florets. Allegedly you can coin the stems, I've not tried it.
  • 1 or 2 heads of cauliflower.

This assumes stocks of olive oil or EVOO and spice blend on hand. I use 2 large baking pans, because I don't have a lot of counter space.

Batch 1 is chicken:

  • Preheat the oven to 425. While that's running, prep the batch:
  • Pat the breasts dry of juice, array them on the pan
  • Lightly coat with OO, you want a thinnish layer, say just short of dripping off, but enough to adhere the spice blend and help cook
    • I have a mister that should help with this, but instead wants to squirt a stream of oil all over, not fog it. I don't have a solution for this beyond keep the stream moving and vary spacing until the result looks right.
  • Dust with spice blend
  • Set timer for 25-35 minutes, depending on weight and preference. 165F in the center is what USDA will tell you to achieve; I think this is high because that's what's needed for instant sterilization, not an accumulation of sterilization over longer times at lower temps.
  • After starting batch 1, immediately prep pan 2:

Batch 2 is broccoli and cauliflower:

  • Use a paring knife to prep the veg as you like. For me this is just cutting florets of both up, medium size.
  • In a second pan, arrange artfully. Some piling is acceptable; if you need this, oil the veg that would get covered up.
  • Apply OO, fairly heavily. I'm not going to say soak, but you want enough for all exposed veg to be wet.
  • Apply spice dust

Wait out the rest of pan 1's cooking time with a beer and entertainment. When your timer dings, cycle pan 2 in immediately, turn the heat to 450 and let it climb, set timer for 25 minutes, and give pan 1 the rest of your beer to cool. Move the chicken out into a storage platter, move the platter to the fridge to start chilling, and pour out chicken juices wherever you find acceptable, perhaps a beer can or the trash. Roughly swab out pan 1 and prep batch 3 in it:

  • Sink wash potatoes, sink wash carrots. Remove blemishes, top and trim.
  • Coarse-chop the carrots to ~1.5" long. Or maybe don't even bother if they'll fit your tupperware and you're feral enough, it doesn't seem to change much.
  • Arrange on pan 1 as you go.
  • Apply OO, you can be pretty light here if you want.
  • Apply spice dust

Wait out batch 2, cycle in batch 3, bake for 40 minutes. While it's cooking, pull the chicken out and start portioning out. For these portions, one day is enough volume to fill one 8-cup Rubbermaid container and one 4-cup Rubbermaid container, as here.

This is, you'll gather, not haut cuisine, and that's somewhat intentional, in order to encourage the food-as-fuel mindset.

Cooking doesn’t take that long if you do it enough to be good at it.

Corollary, some people think it’s work and don’t like it. These people generally don’t do it enough to get good at it, so they don’t get fast at it.

Healthy cooking is usually cheaper than fast food with intelligent meal planning, however, so I don’t think that’s a true criticism.

I’ve always been fairly neurotic about cooking whenever there’s a time pressure. I hate seeing my kitchen devolve into even more of a mess. It’s why I don’t enjoy baking.

Agreed that cheapness is not difficult on its own.

The capability to manage your kitchen and clean as you go is a skill, but it can be learned with enough practice.

Though it's important to remember step zero - make sure your work area is easy to clean.

I hate seeing my kitchen devolve into even more of a mess.

This was something that started off difficult with my wife, too. She was biting off more than she could chew, was wanting to make three complex dishes in one afternoon (some of which might even be brand new), for example, and not even thinking about any cleanup. She would get real anxiety from all the crazy. To stem the bleeding early, I would come into the kitchen just to clean up everything while she was cooking. She has gotten better at figuring out how to clean as she cooks.

If you're not going nuts and making several complex dishes simultaneously, a dishwasher helps, a lot. If it's a big family with no dishwasher, there's definitely a much bigger time penalty in comparison to just eating takeout and throwing everything away.

To what extent do you think it's appropriate to judge someone else for their body type? Would you assess someone that was weak, small, or skinny as also lacking in character?

I think these days basic nutrition knowledge is pretty widespread. I mean it's not very good quality - someone that says "you need carbs for energy" is missing the mark but they at least have the concept of a macronutrient. I did meet a guy once who I had to explain what calories, protein and carbohydrates were to.

To what extent do you think it's appropriate to judge someone else for their body type? Would you assess someone that was weak, small, or skinny as also lacking in character?

It seems like the word "judge" is the one that needs to be defined most here. Else we will struggle between mottes over a bailey neither can claim.

On the one hand if you define the action of judging someone as "deciding that due to this grievous character flaw, this person has no moral worth as a human being and no instrumental value to you or to society in any context;" then obviously it is wrong to judge others on their body type. The counterexamples of people with various suboptimal bodies who are nonetheless valuable and admirable in other ways abound.

On the other hand, if we define judging someone for their body type as "ceteris paribus, the person who allows their body to sink into a state of severe ugliness and uselessness is significantly more likely to exhibit one or more character flaws relative to a person who keeps fit;" then obviously this is a useful parameter for making judgments. If only in the sense that things like income, education, aspirational class, basic grooming, intelligence, all correlate with some degree of fitness.

If you had no other information than BMI, and you were asked to form a team for more or less any task, you'd be better off picking the BMIs in the normal range versus the obese range. ((I say this as someone whose BMI is firmly in "overweight;" the proportion of people who get into the overweight range through lifting weights is a rounding error in the population)) The judgment reflects an accurate and useful fact about the world.

One can still contend that an accurate judgment should be ignored for moral reasons, that everyone deserves a chance. Nepotism is often opposed on moral grounds even if, ceteris paribus, nepotism picks outperform those chosen at random on some parameters.

To me the question, functionally, is whether society is exerting the correct level of judgment. That's where you find out whether you gain an edge. If society is judging too harshly, then you can gain an edge by giving people a real chance. If society isn't judging harshly enough, if they're ignoring relevant information, then applying discrimination can help you choose good candidates.

This is generally one of the flaws in anti-discrimination law, it leaves money on the table for those who break the law.

Yes, I agree that judgment contains a moral dimension, and it's not without basis to apply the concept here - clearly, the consensus that is being built here is that fat people are bad people. But is that judgment actually useful or valuable? That is to say, that if Linda, 52, obese, white, divorcée, six years of experience, applies for an admin position, should her fat ass go to the back of the line? Should you factor in his fatness when deciding if Uncle John is invited to the barbeque? On a population level, have obesity rates skyrocketed over the last hundred years because we've become less moral, and not because it's harder to exercise that discipline in the Oreo Age?

(Of course, I wrote that comment for entirely orthogonal reasons - I often worry compulsively that other people judge me based on being small or weak. And the question stands - would we consider judging an anorexic*, or a weak man?)

(*Anorexia is of course, interesting to me, because I can see the appeal. In many ways it's the inverse of morbid obesity in that it's the fetishization of discipline and adhittana. It's admirable really in a kind of Prince Pamiya kind of way.)

Yes that's the question we're considering. And what I'm asking you is, do you think it has marginal value or no indicative value at all?

So rephrase your questions, back at ya, choose between applicants for an admin position: Linda, 52, six years of experience; Louise, 52, hobby triathlon runner, six years of experience, applies for an admin position. Which do you pick, no other information?

Your Uncle John is 600lbs, eating himself into an early grave. Your Uncle Jack still rows in Masters division meets. Ceteris paribus, which is the one you'd want your child to look up to?

Linda, 52, six years of experience; Louise, 52, hobby triathlon runner, six years of experience, applies for an admin position. Which do you pick, no other information?

If I can't get more information?

Heads, I hire Linda; tails, I hire Louise.

Sure, the skinny/fit one. Outside of the context of perfectly spherical cows, BMI is really just one variable among many - race, age, gender, all of which could justify discrimination. Men, for example, are much more likely to be criminals than women are, while old people are much more likely to die.

Sure. And if we iterate a thousand reps with the time and a few thousand bored college students we could assign weights to each. We could run Fat Linda with a degree from a Penn State branch in the Poconos against Fit Louise with an associates, and scrawny John the deacon at my local church against Crossfit Jack who got divorced until we settle on a weight for body weight, where being out of shape is worth about a year of college or $10k/yr in income or such and such level of ability in raising a kid. I can even come up with reverse arguments: a girl who is in too obsessively good of shape may be vain, a slightly pudgy guy might be more relaxed and fun! Maybe that plays in!

And then eventually we would have cohesive metrics to determine just how much to judge someone. But in reality, we'll never exactly get that, so it'll just be informal. If you're arguing that most people assign too much weight to weight, argue that, but that's different from "don't judge people by their bodies!" It's "don't judge people too harshly!"

Fat advocacy is constantly assaulted by the problem of people judging too harshly on one hand, slightly overweight people thrown in with the 600lb life folks and judged as obese wastes of space; and on the other hand 400lb people trying to argue that they're the same as the chubby moms, and don't deserve any critique at all. And there are points where we say don't judge by because it has bad social impacts. Argue that! But we all should agree it's a basis for judgment.

Also it's obvious to judge men to be more dangerous than women! I used to have to get assistant rock climbing coaches to fill out SafeSport background check forms, and consistently it was the teenage girls who got super upset because "I can't remember the address we lived at when I was eight and my mom won't pick up the phone!" And I had to explain to them, it doesn't matter, teenage girls aren't who they are looking out for, it's just civil rights law that they have to make you fill out the form too. Refusing to exercise judgment there creates vastly more paperwork.

I did not originally suggest that it's wrong to judge people for their bodies. I just asked if that same judgment applies to people who have otherwise unappealing or unhealthy bodies. Is it immoral to be very skinny or to be weak? Do we consider people with severe eating disorders to be immoral - so long as they keep themselves in that sweet BMI spot? What about anorexics - certainly, one cannot fault their discipline.

I just asked if that same judgment applies to people who have otherwise unappealing or unhealthy bodies.

Yes. Clearly, to an unhealthily skinny person.

Do we consider people with severe eating disorders to be immoral - so long as they keep themselves in that sweet BMI spot?

Absent damaging health problems or mental distress, I actually don't quite know what an eating disorder is. When we were teenagers it was skipping meals, but now most of the informed fit people I know utilize fasting at least some of the time for health reasons, and they function well. At the same time, eating disorders have expanded to include "Orthorexia" which is eating very healthy foods.

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I’m not going to judge just on weight. There are just some obviously bad habits that I think if I know about them I would include in the estimate of their character. A person who is clearly and obviously out of control in a major area of life likely has other serious issues that need to be dealt with. If we go out and you have 3-5 drinks, I’m taking note. If you have obvious problems regulating your screen use, I’m taking note of that. There are just certain things you can use for a proxy for desirable behaviors. And I see no problem with saying that being overweight beyond the normal range is somewhat a good proxy for self discipline.

Would you assess someone that was weak, small, or skinny as also lacking in character?

I think it's reasonable to infer that, all things being equal, an able-bodied person who's visibly fit or strong has more discipline than an able-bodied person who is neither of those things (with certain caveats: it requires more discipline to hit the gym several times a week as opposed to working a job in which you're using your body all day long).

Other than genetics, the only thing that will have any meaningful impact on one's height is childhood nutrition (or lack thereof) - neither of which an adult has any control over as an adult. (For clarity: it's not reasonable to expect a five-year-old to feed themselves, never mind to feed themselves healthily. If they wind up shorter than one would expect based on family history because of poor childhood nutrition, then they're a victim of child abuse.)

It's an old joke/grievance, but short male incels are entirely justified to point out that it's completely unfair that making fun of a man for his height is seen as perfectly fair game, but making fun of a woman for her weight is seen as beyond the pale.

Who says it’s beyond the pale to make fun of fat women? It’s not the politest joke in the world, but neither is the short guy humor.

It's a hard thing to quantify, but I think a talk show host who made a joke at a fat woman's expense would face far greater social disapproval than one who made fun of a short man. I think Graham Norton or Jimmy Fallon could get away with teasing a man for being short (provided he wasn't a literal dwarf) in a way they couldn't if they had Lizzo or Rebel Wilson on as a guest. Nicole Kidman joked that one of the best things about divorcing Tom Cruise was that she could wear heels again, and got a huge laugh. If a male celebrity was married to Lizzo and divorced her, if he made an equivalent joke on a mainstream chat show people would be appalled. The body positivity movement pointedly does not include short men under its remit.

You don’t have to listen to the body positivity movement.

I know I don't, and indeed I don't. My point is that I think it's very telling that the movement exists, is influential, and is by and for overweight women.

I've heard that it was actually by and for men who love overweight women who wanted both to encourage more overweight women and a group where it's easy to meet a lot of overweight women, though I haven't checked deeply for the veracity. Perhaps it's been fully coopted by overweight women by now, though, regardless of the origins.

There's far more overweight women than there are men who like overweight women, by order of magnitude...

I have hate-followed the HAES/Body Positivity/Intuitive Eating movement for years. It is absolutely for fat women. There are a few fat men in the movement (though they mostly keep quiet because they will quickly be told that they don't suffer as much from society's fatphobia as women do), and there may be a handful of fat-fetishists, but the vast majority are fat women who want to be told that they are sexy and desirable and healthy and don't need to change a thing.

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To what extent do you think it's appropriate to judge someone else for their body type? Would you assess someone that was weak, small, or skinny as also lacking in character?

Not the OP, but I will bite - yes, it is appropriate with possibly the exception of "small". I can judge people especially for things that can be under their control: that they are weak, that they are anorectic, that they lack personal hygiene, that they have bad breath and other things including things like tattoos, piercings, foul language and so forth.

Now I have a question for you: why do you think it is appropriate to judge me for my criteria I judge for? Why should I care for what you judge as judgmental? Are you some ultimate meta-judge, who is going to set the standards of judging for all people? Who elected you into this position?

Well, I'm not really interested in judging others (beyond ways that are immediately useful). Fundamentally, people base their judgment not on their own, spontaneously generated values, but on the values they were taught by society. I don't think it's possible or even worth trying to truly escape from those values, though of course you can react against them superficially or engage in dialogue with them.

Well, I'm not really interested in judging others

I don't believe you (90% of the time when Alice criticises Bob for being "judgemental" all she means is that Bob routinely expresses judgements that Alice doesn't agree with), but even if that really was the case, I think you should be.

That's silly. Of course you should make a judgment on the people you live with and whether they will steal from you or not. That is an example of a very useful judgment. Judging people on the TV is not useful.

Well, I would counter that forming assessments of people is a muscle, and if you don't use it, it might atrophy. That's the whole reason behind "learning from other people's mistakes" or "learning to recognise red flags": recognising that behaviour X is toxic and harmful in a person you don't know personally will make it easier to identify when someone you DO know starts exhibiting that behaviour. (Who knows, maybe there are people who started watching My 600 Lb Life for entirely base, ignoble reasons, but came away from it better equipped to spot warning signs of problem eating in their own friends and family.) If you only ever express judgements of people when being on the wrong side of a judgement call could have a severe negative impact on your life, but remain stubbornly agnostic at all other times, you run a severe risk of making the wrong judgement call when it really matters, or perhaps even failing to recognise that you're in a situation in which a judgement call is required. (Basically https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/09/constant-vigilance/)

Imagine two social workers, one who is extremely credulous and endlessly forgiving for all the bullshit excuses her junkie asshole clients offer her (after all, it doesn't affect her one way or the other); the other who sees through their bullshit instantly and tells them to get their shit together or she's cutting their social welfare. Which of these do you think is more likely to get ripped off when her own son gets into meth?

Or to use a less emotionally loaded example: imagine two employers, Alice and Bob, who make hiring decisions in their respective firms. Sometimes Alice's contacts in other firms will send her a CV and say "I'm thinking of hiring this candidate, what do you think of him?", and Alice always does her level best to provide an honest and fair assessment of the candidate's strengths and weaknesses according to their CV. The same thing happens to Bob, and he generally just tells the contact what he thinks they want to hear - after all, hiring decisions in another firm have no impact upon him personally. I would argue that Bob is far more likely to make a bad hiring decision in his own firm than Alice is, as by passing up valuable opportunities to assess candidates in other firms, his skill in this area will be more poorly honed than Alice's.

but on the values they were taught by society

I went to a Catholic primary school and was inculcated with a set of values on how I ought to judge people. More recently, as an adult, I have been bombarded with messaging about how I ought to judge people, coming from a woke perspective.

Truthfully, I don't really think either inculcation attempt was successful. I'm not claiming that I'm some kind of independent freethinker who Does His Own Research unlike you #sheeple. Rather, I think that, to the extent that I judge people, I'm relying heavily on heuristics bestowed on me by natural selection. Obese people, junkies and certain other groups inspire a primitive disgust reaction in me which feels deeply innate, an instinctive knee-jerk response similar to the reflexive stomach-turning sensation you get when you smell vomit or rotten food.

(Not that I'm saying all of my instinctive disgust reactions are appropriate or reasonable! There was a thread this week asking why some people feel uncomfortable around people with Down's syndrome, and I will cop to that - I know it's not fair of me to have that reaction. Likewise people born with horrific facial deformities.)

Maybe when I judge people on a higher level of cognitive reasoning, that's something that can be consciously inculcated or taught. I don't really know, though. A lot of my moral reasoning seems to ultimately come down to "what's good for the goose is good for the gander", an evolutionary heuristic we share with chimpanzees.

I concede that in addition to society's values, you also inherit a bit from evolution. Either way, you are not forming your values. For example, you say that it's not fair of you to have a negative reaction to DS people. But you didn't invent that notion of fairness independently.

No, I didn't independently of my own accord arrive at the conclusion that you should treat people with Down's syndrome with respect. Probably there are very few people who can truly claim to be moral innovators in this regard.

I went to a Catholic primary school and was inculcated with a set of values on how I ought to judge people.

Catholics aren't big on Matthew 7:1 I guess?

Yes, but there's still much judging to be done. Luther and Calvin are clear.

But, lest we may stumble at this preaching and misunderstand it, if hereby it were altogether forbidden to judge and pass sentence, it is clear from what has often been said above, that Christ is preaching here only to his disciples, and is not at all speaking of the judgment or punishment that must occur in the world; as father and mother at home among the children and servants must judge, rebuke, and also chastise, if they will not do right.

These words of Christ do not contain an absolute prohibition from judging, but are intended to cure a disease, which appears to be natural to us all. We see how all flatter themselves, and every man passes a severe censure on others. This vice is attended by some strange enjoyment: for there is hardly any person who is not tickled with the desire of inquiring into other people’s faults. All acknowledge, indeed, that it is an intolerable evil, that those who overlook their own vices are so inveterate against their brethren.

John 7:24

Fundamentally, people base their judgment not on their own, spontaneously generated values, but on the values they were taught by society.

I don't buy it. Society pounds me with messaging about how I shouldn't judge, that people could be fat for any reason or no reason at all, that we barely even have control over our own bodies. In stark contrast, my personal experience is that I can manipulate weight and body composition by simply making choices and developing consistent habits. This isn't difficult at all for me. The reason that I judge fat people isn't because society told me to, it's that my personal experience makes me believe that they have serious character defects. I can believe that making choices and developing habits is much harder for some people than others and still recognize that this is a product of poor executive function, which manifests as a character defect.

There is a small coterie of fat acceptance activists that is occasionally wheeled out like the Washington Generals or the Libertarian Party to be laughed at, but for the most part, no. That's why 600lbs Life even exists in the first place, it's a show that as we have just discussed in this thread, make fat people look even worse. Why does such a show exist? So people can watch it and feel justified in hating fat people. Which is to say, it makes them feel better about something they were already doing. It's not by accident that you are, yet again here, casually mentioning how easy* it is for you to gain fifty pounds of muscle or lose fifty pounds of fat on a dime. It's not because you're embarrassed.

  • It comes and goes, but it was once the fashion for people to brag about how hard they trained or how strictly they didn't. In the year 2024 it seems the opposite - fitness models take pictures of themselves eating donuts, and now people seem to brag about how little they need to train.

I train a lot and I don't think I've ever claimed otherwise. The easy part is identifying what needs to be done to gain muscle, lose fat, increase strength, or increase aerobic endurance. My claim isn't that people don't need to actually make changes, it's that failing to do so is a character defect. Denying that it's even possible to do so is even worse, diminishing people below the level of having agency over their own bodies. As with other addicts, it's easy to observe that they're telling the truth about their inability to regulate their own behavior, but it is a defect.

So people need to make changes - to what end? What ideal body type are people supposed to be striving for? I mean even over thirty years I've seen expectations of what men should look like change a fair bit.

If someone was stretching me out on the rack, I wouldn't need a complete answer for what my happiest possible state looked like to know that I would be a lot closer to it if the torture stopped. You don't need to fully flesh out (no pun intended) the ideal body type to argue it's better not to be obese.

Well, I'm not really interested in judging others (beyond ways that are immediately useful).

I don't believe you, unless maybe you have a very broad definition of immediately useful. For instance, what use did you have scolding the OP for judging people outside of their "character"?

I openly admit that I am very interested in judging. Judgment is necessary when analyzing all actions or things as good/moral or bad. What I wanted to point out is a very common trope of some people, who lack even basic self awareness and who can with straight face say things such as "unlike all those nasty bigots, I am very open-minded and non-judgmental person". The ask by anybody not to judge, is often just a manipulation technique to normalize and shelter from criticism what they themselves judge as a good thing. With no such treatment offered to what they deem as bad things such as bigotry, which has to be judged and punished harshly.

I didn't scold the OP at all. It's quite normal to judge others, particularly men, for being small or weak, and I've been on the receiving end of that judgment many times. Of course, there is a difference between observation and judgment. I can observe someone's behaviour without forming an opinion on it. I also don't agree that judgment is always necessary. This is not meant in a cuddly liberal way. Rather in a kind of sense that one should treat events and people sort of like passing clouds. And I would add that I also think that I am very judgmental - I just don't think that's a valuable or desirable trait in myself.

Even for stoics it is absolutely okay to judge others and especially themselves in accordance with stoic virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. For instance Seneca was very critical of Nero, and Epictetus had no problem judging emperor Domitian for his tyrannical actions.

In fact Stoics would be the first ones to point to fat people as negative example of what happens if one lacks self-control, which is the core basis of the virtue of temperance. I know this, because they actually did condemn gluttony and other excesses of Roman elites.

I am not sure where you came to this idea that stoics are some silent monks never to talk and make judgements. One of they key values of stoicism is courage, which includes courage to tell the truth even in face of tyrants like Caligula who wanted to order Seneca to commit suicide, then let it go given Seneca's poor health.

Fine, I have deleted the word stoic from my post. I would not have added it if I knew this would mislead you so badly.

Rather in a kind of stoic sense that one should treat events and people sort of like passing clouds.

This would be easier if the non-stoic side of the anti-judgment movement were able to keep their behavior restrained. A lot of people do act like you; though they don't pretend they don't judge. They just judge silently but choose to be polite. But forbearance is mistaken for weakness which is followed by an attempt to deny that the judgment is legitimate.

Since We Live in a Society someone is going to have to be disagreeable and tell the truth that being fat is usually a lack of virtue and trying to cover that fact up is also lack of virtue. If only for the kids, who can't be expected to have a philosopher's judgment and stoic detachment.

You might benefit from reading what I said. I said I'm not interested in judging others, not that I didn't - I of course, pass judgment on others, naturally and uncontrollably, and according to values I did not generate. But that judgment is rarely useful - if someone irritates me, or displeases me, what can I do about it other than seethe? Isn't that the real poison in whale watching on reality TV? Why not watch Sam Sulek instead?

Oh, come on now. You literally have reality TV shows devoted to displaying fatties like circus freaks for the people in this thread to hate on. If you needed to be told by your television set that it's okay to hate fat people, then you're not being brave. If you're watching it, it's for you - people watch shows like this to be told they're right, not to be challenged.

and other things including things like tattoos, piercings, foul language and so forth

Are you judging them solely on aesthetics here? Or do you think these things actually give you meaningful insight about their character?

Or do you think these things actually give you meaningful insight about their character?

I certainly do, or at least I think one can draw meaningful inferences from these things. At the banal level, you can look at certain tattoos and reasonably infer that the person got it when they were in prison. More broadly, a person with prominent facial tattoos or piercings is making (or has made) a conscious decision to transgress certain standards of how people are expected to comport themselves in a particular society, which implies a disregard for social convention and perhaps an elevated* willingness to transgress social norms other than mere dress and comportment.

I have one tattoo but it's on my torso.

*When compared with someone without prominent facial tattoos or piercings.

If by character you mean moral character, then yes, aesthetics can be used to signal moral character. If I see somebody with MS-13 face tattoo or wearing Hells Angels bike jacket, I have no problem with that.

And sometimes I will also judge outside of moral character. If I want a partner for pickup basketball, then I may judge a 5 foot tall nice god-fearing guy as unsuitable for that role. In fact if he is of a good moral character, then I expect him to accept it with stoicism and plow through the situation with grace and respect as opposed to complaining about it. If he did whine, then I would also judge him as a little whiner unsuitable for other activities as well.

The issue with gang tats isn't that they have ink in their skin; it's that they are openly advertising that they are a member of a murderous gang. You're conflating the message with the medium. Do you not actually judge all people with tattoos in general? If you do, can you explain what you're judging them for/about? The same goes for piercings and swearing; what about these things leads you to make character judgments?

Yes, I judge people with visible tattoos for it. Specifically, they’re valuing self expression over not looking like ruffians.

“Like ruffians”? Piercings and non-facial tattoos aren’t that taboo anymore. Almost half of adults under 45 have at least one tattoo. It’s been over a decade since the “tatted-up barista with full sleeves” archetype became a thing. Workplace rules about covering up tattoos have also become far more relaxed in most industries. Sure, face tats are still pretty taboo outside of the traditional subcultures you'd find them (line cooks, construction, etc.), but the OP didn't specify face tats in particular.

Personally, I don’t have any tattoos, but that's because I’ve never felt the desire for any, not because I think I would be ostracised for violating a social norm. The worst I would have to endure is my parents giving me shit cause they think all tattoos look ugly.

You can say it about other things as well. More than 20% of people in USA are obese, 1 in 5 people un USA experience mental illness, 25% of women are expected to get abortion, 28% of black males and 16% of Hispanic males will be incarcerated during their lifetimes. We can go on. I do not think that just because something is common, that it automatically means it is also a good thing.

So yeah, maybe it is not such a good thing that we normalized former taboos. What is also interesting in this debate is that the word judging really has negative connotations for many people - except of course if you "judge" something positively. Fat Cosmopolitan model? No problem if somebody judges her overflowing fat as beautiful and herself as stunning and brave person. Somebody has neck tattoos and sleeves? No problem complimenting them for their bravery and confidence. Of course you can judge somebody if he has Make America Great Again sleeve, in that case it is disgusting and not a signal that this person is actually brave to wear his beliefs literally on his sleeve.

It is not about being judgemental or non-judgemental. It is about judging certain things positively and other things negatively, while claiming the moral high ground.

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Sure, the MS-13 face tattoo was just an obvious example that was meant to show the principle - if you present yourself or behave in certain way, you will be judged, it is inevitable.

Let´s say that I know that somebody has tattoos and piercings, and I do not know anything about it: if it is some face tattoo or tramp stamp or nipple piercing etc.

I could judge such a person as having been at certain point in time as reckless, vain, possibly with some body dismorphia or at least self-esteem complex. It is not some gamebreaker for me, but neither is obesity. But it is a hint.

But there is another level here I want to touch. Sometimes there are situations, where we are speaking about very deep concepts, which evade “rationalist” thinking and endless scrutiny. One famous example is when Plato went about in his Academia, thinking about definition of what is a man, he came up with definition of “featherless biped”. Then he met Diogenes:

According to Diogenes Laërtius, when Plato gave the tongue-in-cheek definition of man as "featherless bipeds", Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Here is Plato's man" (Οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ Πλάτωνος ἄνθρωπος), and so the academy added "with broad flat nails" to the definition.

This is such a rationalist story. Everybody knows what is a man, even a child or village idiot. A good example of trying to ruminate and categorize definitions of what is X, only to completely miss the point and ontology of the problem. This is similar to me: being a fat, weak, tatooed person with a ton of piercings who swears like a sailor is weird and stupid. We may endlessly harp on it, adding epicycles to our definitions but it will not capture the essence. Also there is the tactic of “dont be judgemental” and accept the expert definition, in order to shame you out of your instinct, that even a small child learns somehow without knowing that fat people have higher risk of diabetes according to this metastudy.

Aesthetics give a meaningful insight about character.

Now you have to have some cultural substrate to read it properly as for instance tats could mean extreme religiosity or irreligiosity depending on where you are, but it is a signal. Consciously or unconsciously people use their looks to communicate something to you.

A book's cover isn't the entire story, but it does give good insight about the content most of the time. The title is usually accurate, and if it's lined with that arsenic green, you know to grab gloves just in case.

The title is usually accurate

This does not appear to be the case, if you’re judging someone’s moral character based on the mere presence of tattoos.

People marking their bodies in a way that they know leads people to make assessments about their personal characteristics and then complaining that people make those assessments tells me something about their character. Personally, I like quite a few tattoos, have had great friends and serious romantic relationships with tattooed people, but yeah, there are assessments that you can make based on tattoos that are reasonable.

People marking their bodies in a way that they know leads people to make assessments about their personal characteristics and then complaining that people make those assessments tells me something about their character.

Being visibly Jewish in a place whose inhabitants hate Jews by your reasoning also says something about one's character. Or kissing one's gay partner in front of a homophobe. Or having a bumper sticker proclaiming your political party in a place where people oppose that political party.

If doing X leads to bad reactions, those bad reactions can't be justified with an appeal to "they know it'll have bad reactions".

Doing X knowing full well that it will inspire a negative reaction doesn't necessarily tell you anything about a person's moral character, but it absolutely does suggest that they are reckless, foolish, prone to taking unnecessary risks, lack forethought etc.

Supposing a broker was telling me that I should invest in company X because it was an absolute sure thing. I notice that he has a tattoo on his bicep reading "MAN U PREMIER LEAGUE CHAMPIONS 20XX" when in fact Arsenal won that year, and he explains that he got the tattoo when Man U won the semi-final. I'm sure he's still a nice guy, but it's only reasonable for me to heavily discount his claim that such-and-such is a "sure thing".

Those things all do say something about one’s character. Some degree of rebelliousness, courageous, or social obliviousness is required to do things in public you know will garner negative reactions. The fact the reactions are negative do not make the actions negative per se, but they do change what information you can gather from the action.

In your example: there are presumably other gay couples that don’t kiss in front of homophobes, and that allows you to judge them in other ways. Maybe they’re cowardly, or just very polite.

Being visibly Jewish in a place whose inhabitants hate Jews by your reasoning also says something about one's character. Or kissing one's gay partner in front of a homophobe. Or having a bumper sticker proclaiming your political party in a place where people oppose that political party.

It certainly does in all such instances. Absolutely.

justified

You are the one turning a purely analytic argument into a moral one here. Figuring out one's moral character doesn't directly have much to do with what sort of moral character is appropriate or just or what have you.

It can be good or it can be bad that you're the sort of person who is covered in tats or engages in risky ostentatious displays.

But it is something.

The objection in these cases isn't that someone wearing a Star of David is identified as a Jew, it's to the antisemitism downstream of it. Likewise, if someone kisses their gay partner, it's reasonable to infer that they're not straight and that someone with a bumper sticker is a supporter of that candidate. All of these things are examples of appearances that lead to correct identifications of people.

I didn't write anything about bad reactions specifically. I wrote that people will make assessments based on tattoos and that this is a fine and reasonable to thing to do. Of course, I do think some bad reactions are legitimate - treating people with gang tattoos (or apparent gang tattoos) as threats is a good decision. But really, even the most mild, inoffensive tattoos imaginable still provide information about the individual with them.

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It's an analogy.

And I can tell with a high degree of accuracy that someone who bears permanent tatoos is unlikely to be a serious practitioner of most Abrahamic religions or other such naturalistic philosophies since they ban the practice with a small number of exceptions.

This does tell me something about their moral character. In that they do not hold their body's form to be sacred. Which itself is correlated to other things.

Of course none can read minds and have perfect knowledge of circumstances. Hence the phrase about the book and its cover.

But only a fool blinds himself to the obvious in the name of deeper inquiry.

When people tell you who they are. Including by making aesthetic choices. Believe them.

In that they do not hold their body's form to be sacred. Which itself is correlated to other things.

And what correlated negative moral judgments might that be?

Once upon a time in ancient China, it was forbidden to cut your hair because that would be violating the sanctity of the body your parents gave you. Obviously, we find this to be a rather silly judgment nowadays. In fact, conservative Chinese people these days look down upon long haired males.

It's a common mistake to look at tradition from this empty standpoint of pure reason and think that just because it's arbitrary, it signifies nothing.

The fact it was so strongly forbidden informs you very strongly as to the behavior of people vis a vis social norms and is a good proxy for their beliefs given the basis of such social norms if they violate it.

Ancient Chinese people who sought to honor their parents in the ways of their culture at this time wouldn't break the taboo. Which makes the existence of it valuable to signal familial loyalty. Indeed a common occurrence in early modern China would be the opposition between this particular norm and new modern norms. How people negotiated this opposition told you much about where they stood at that pivotal time. Symbols are meaningful.

That the cultural mores change and the signals with them is not a failure of tradition. It is in fact how tradition works and how it is eternal, despite the specific instantiations of it being ephemeral.

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What @hydroacetylene said below.

There is even a subculture of (admittedly very online) RadTrads who almost encourage getting a Christogram tattooed on you somewhere.

And there's the tradition of sicanje. That is, however, largely cultural as opposed to theological.

I've personally always wondered why the aesthetic traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy do seem to bump up against an invisible force field when it comes to tattooing.

Having double-sleeved up young priests (all images being reverent, of course) might help The Youths feel like the Church is no cap fr fr.

Muslims have Henna despite stronger (but not coranic) prohibitions. I am not talking here in the absolute, but the general tendency of Abrahamism is to disavow such practices and people who disavow such practices are therefore more likely to be Abrahamists, which is useful information.

As I have said previously, reading cultural signals requires knowledge of the relevant cultures to be satisfyingly accurate. And it never bears certainty because we are all individuals. But generalizations are still useful and informative, despite the fanatical attempts by many to deny that they are.

There are traditional tattoos given at the end of pilgrimage routes in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Full tattoo sleeves aren't looked on very kindly by either tradition because God made our bodies about the way he wants them to be, but it's not a sin per se.

And obviously self consciously relevant posturing is more likely to be cringe than relevant.

No, Christianity does not ban tattoos. It doesn’t look particularly kindly on the practice but there’s no hard ban.

that demands the world bend around them

Strictly speaking, it does. Each one exerts a far bigger gravitational force than the average person.

That's spacetime bending, not the world. The world moves along the bent geodesics while remaining resolutely round in its own reference frame.

"So dense light bends around him/her" remains my favourite physicist's insult.

So, in conclusion, I have come into belief that you should judge people for being obese. Not to say that all fat people are ignorant, entitled, and stupid. But they definitely have at least one of these traits, and should be avoided at all costs.

Consider that the people who get selected to be controversial and entertaining enough to be cast on reality TV, and the interactions which are edited by the producers into the final cut, are not representative of the general population.

Signed, a fatty who knows exactly why he is fat (depression, gluttony, and laziness), and does not expect anyone to do anything for him.

Reality tv is not "real." You are drawing strong, condemnatory conclusions about people in the real world because of the way characters in a TV show behave.

Perhaps you shouldn't be too quick to condemn anyone for ignorance.

This is what I was told, and, being born into a solid middle class environment, I believed it. But tbh after living for a while in cheap urban neighbourhoods (I'm very glad I do not anymore!), it seems much less obvious. Not literally everyone, but the majority of my neighbours really was trash reality tv-tier in behaviour. A minority was worse. Very few were better. Afaik reality tv nowadays selects in both directions; Yes they look for trashy people, but not too trashy bc middle class and higher who have no contact with these people will stop watching since it's too much for them.

As someone who’s never interacted with people like that, would you care to give some concrete examples of common trashy behavior?

Mostly what @loper says, being loud & obnoxious, predictably self-hurting stupidity, casual disregard for other but not even with any perceptible gain for themselves, unnecessary constant interpersonal drama. Some specific people/situations I've lived with:

  • A young couple which would reliably fight every odd day. The girl would throw the guy out in the late afternoon or so, the guy comes back later at night after drinking, she screams at him while he is pleading for 1-2 hours, and then eventually let him in. Don't know what they were fighting about, was in spanish. Loud enough to keep me awake. And when I say every odd day, I mean every odd day.

  • I come to a new place, middle of winter in London, shared accomodations, really cheap. But the floor is extremely dirty so that you have to put on fucking shoes to go to the bathroom or kitchen. Everyone complains about it ... But a cleaning lady comes weekly, and actually cleans really well. I tell people to just put some cheap house shoes on, that way they don't get dirty feet but also don't bring in the mountains of dirty snow from outside. Nobody listens except an older polish couple who already wore house shoes. They ask me why I even bother. Everyone else continues complaining about everyone else, but changes nothing.

  • A bartender / odd jobs girl. Claimed to be a professionally trained singer, but I'm pretty sure that was either some kind of fake college scam or she was just making shit up. Always broke, I actually loaned her money once (not much), but she ate out constantly, went to coffee shops every day, go to expensive concerts weekly etc. and still would complain how she wouldn't earn enough. Roughly once per month she would bring a new guy with her, usually after partying, so around 4 in the morning, turn on loud music, fuck even louder (apparently the music wasn't yet loud enough). Next or a few days later she would cry a lot and spew bile into the phone. Rinse and repeat. At least it was less often than the couple.

  • A raging alcoholic whom I lived next door to for 7 years which I literally never have seen in person. As far as I know from others, he slept through the day, gets up in the late evening, grabs some alcohol and drank until he falls asleep. And I know he loved WW2 docs. In fact the whole neighbourhood knew. Because every summer day when it got hot he would open all his windows at night and the TV was so loud that you couldn't sleep since we also needed to have the windows open. If you ring his doorbell he would ignore it. If you screamed loud enough ( he lived top floor) he would scream back that you should shut up, or else he'll come down and fucking kill you. I called the police once or twice when I was sufficiently pissed, but it didn't really help much.

  • Another guy I never saw. Turns out he completely trashed the place, then went back to his family but was so ashamed that he continued paying rent several years. His family had to pay a few thousand on top for repairs once the landlord realised. Which is actually unusually nice, since ...

  • rent nomads exist. The only I didn't actually live next to, but I worked as a postman for a while and saw a case first-hand. They pay rent for like three months up front to get in and to get some legal eviction protection, then they don't pay rent for months and once you get close to evicting them they trash the place out of spite and vanish over night.

Edit: oh and I almost forgot: Somebody once stole a flower pot from our balcony ... And put it on their own balcony. Which was right next door. In plain sight. It wasn't even expensive. Just .. why ?

Its been a while but:

  • Being unhygienic and smelly
  • Leaving trash everywhere they go
  • Almost always wearing very casual and dirty clothes
  • Getting into loud public fights about inane shit.
  • Getting drunk on weekdays and getting into fistfights at the local pub
  • Doing drugs in public
  • Spitting indoors
  • Stealing from the local supermarket
  • Wearing way too much makeup and waxing their eyebrows
  • Harassing women
  • Very publicly running their prostitution business out of their apartment.
  • Constantly abrasive towards everyone
  • Having phone calls (or watching/listening to media) on speaker on public transit
  • Stealing laundry times (if you have a communal laundry room), and fighting with you about it when confronted
  • Constant, unrelenting lies about their poor behaviour
  • Casual destruction and defacement of public property

Defending rather than rebuking or chastising their ill behaved children.

Generational NEET

Leaving trash everywhere they go

This is the most striking feature of degeneracy. So many of the other things I can at least understand when I contemplate their lives. Stealing from the supermarket is bad, but the individual doing it does benefit. Drinking aggressively in the park until you pass out isn't great, but hey, I like drinking too and simply have a place to do it that people don't notice.

But just throwing things on the ground? What the fuck? Why? You are literally five feet from a garbage can, you could just as easily deposit your trash there, but instead you drop a glass bottle on the sidewalk where it shatters, leaving shards of glass for some unsuspecting dog to slice up their feet. This can only be described as wanton, casual malice for the world around them. This is the act that moves people from my mental category of pitiful into the category of despised.

You are literally five feet from a garbage can

To be fair, I personally have not seen public garbage receptacles spaced anywhere near so closely in the cities that I have frequented. But I still think that failing to carry one's garbage for an extra quarter-mile of walking is pretty lazy.

I'm not referring to a general case, I referring to the specific case of the degenerates I see in the park that literally prefer to throw things on the ground than walk five feet to the garbage can. In many cases, they'll literally need to walk past the garbage can to leave the park.

It is reality TV. I'm not contesting that.

But they sound exactly the same way really fat people I've talked to in real life. They behave in exactly the same way, just to an exaggerated extreme. They have the same excuses, the same denial, the same willful ignorance that will lead them - eventually - to an early grave.

One of them is my own mother.

But suppose that there really is a obese person who is well-informed, conscientious, and intelligent. Knowing that what they are doing themselves - that their diet is harmful - and then doing it anyway is no credit to them, no more than that same hypothetical person who was all that, and a heroin addict. In fact, it makes it worse.

One of my guilty pleasures is trash TV, including My 600 Pound Life.

Your observations are generally true for the people on that show. But I think you're being rather uncharitable.

First of all, the patients on that show are extraordinarily obese and unhealthy. They are not your "usual" fat person, but people who've literally reached the point of "lose weight or die." They are also, of course, selected for dramatic and disagreeable personalities who will make for good TV. (You can even see viewers complaining when the season is "too boring" because the patients are cooperative and not dramatic enough.)

You also neglected to mention that most of them are suffering from severe mental illness. The food addiction that has rendered them nearly immobile is clearly a mental illness in itself, but most of them have all kinds of other problems. Most of them are impoverished and come from abusive backgrounds. Childhood sexual abuse is a very common theme. You say they are stupid, entitled, and ignorant; there's a reason you don't see many of them who come from stable and supportive middle class families. Most of the time, when we see family members, they are as fucked up as the patient, if not as fat.

And it's a reality TV show! You know that shit is heavily edited, right? My 600 Pound Life, like most such shows, has been accused of staging confrontations, feeding the "participants" their lines, crafting "storylines" to make them more dramatic, and so on. The patients may be real and their issues are too, but I would not trust the show to be giving you a really accurate picture.

Now, more generally I agree that fat people (even "normal" fat people) have a strong tendency to be in denial about how much they eat and how little exercise they do, or about the health effects of obesity. But it should be obvious that making broad generalizations based on the personalities who appear on a reality TV show is just taking cheap swings at easy targets.

Now, more generally I agree that fat people (even "normal" fat people) have a strong tendency to be in denial about how much they eat and how little exercise they do, or about the health effects of obesity.

No, I know exactly how much I eat and how little I exercise. I'm lazy and depressive; exercise sucks compared to eating delicious food and reading a good book or playing a wargame in a comfy chair.

Now, more generally I agree that fat people (even "normal" fat people) have a strong tendency to be in denial about how much they eat and how little exercise they do, or about the health effects of obesity.

I'm not in denial about anything; I'm just not willing to spend the rest of my life fighting against my set point by suffering from starvation neurosis and working a part-time job at the gym in order to maintain a healthy weight.

The set point is not set. It might be harder to adjust it downwards than upwards, and going from 80kg to 70kg is transformative and empowering the way going from 130kg to 120kg is not, but pushing down on your set point is quite possible.

Set point theory is very popular among fat activists, yes.

People's metabolisms do vary (which is why "CICO" is both true and simplistic - the "burn rate" is not the same for every person). But nobody weighs 400 pounds because that's what their "set point" says they should weigh, and I have only ever met two kinds of severely obese people: those who admit they eat too much, and those who make up reasons why somehow normal rules of biology and physics are different for them.

For the most part, pro-CICO people seem to reject the idea of fast or slow metabolisms.

I don't know what pile of straw you've found your "pro-CICO people" from, but in my experience, they are happy to point you directly to places where you can see the variability for yourself. I'll even preempt any digging in the straw you might do to claim that "pro-CICO people" simply reject the concept of metabolic adaptation, because they actually write entire articles about it, what it is, what it isn't, and what it practically means for people.

At the end of the day, they say things like that the Cunningham equation (or a few others) actually do a pretty good job of getting you to the right ballpark, but then you probably need direct observation if you want to really nail down where you are with precision. My wife and I proceeded with direct observation, and sure enough, the population-based equation estimates got us pretty darn close, but what was really incredible was that even though the data was insanely noisy (which was expected, and I have enough background in numerical analysis to know how awful that noise would be for estimating derivatives), the trend line over a couple years of tracking (through periods of cutting, periods of maintaining, and periods of gaining) was bang on at exactly 500cal/day = 1lb/wk... for both of us. The "pro-CICO people" that you strawman are actually doing things like putting direct observation into an app rather than making ridiculous claims like there being no variability whatsoever.

The thesis of CICO is that it's not just a useful guide, but literally an iron law of the universe. Ever heard of something called thermodynamics? So it's not obvious to me how a "metabolism" (whatever that is) can conjure up, or delete, energy or mass.

Personally I found CICO useful for losing weight and not useful for gaining weight. But, based on my own direct observation, you'll probably just call me a liar or say that I was tracking wrong. That is of course, what every CICO advocate does immediately. After all, CICO is (apparently) totally perfect and based on thermodynamics.

Perhaps you should read the link, discussing variability in the calories out portion. Saying that CICO is thermodynamics and that there is variability at least in CO is perfectly consistent. I'm not sure what windmill you think you've slain.

you'll probably just call me a liar or say that I was tracking wrong. That is of course, what every CICO advocate does immediately.

I will not call you a liar, but this is indicative of the mindset with which you are entering this conversation. You have tarred the people you hate with a scarlet letter and then simply closed your mind to any meaningful discussion. Very bad epistemic hygiene.

I don't hate CICO advocates, I just don't know if there's a constructive conversation to be had with people who consistently respond to everything with "you're lying" or "you must have missed something". This is also epistemic closure - anyone who struggles with CICO is always accused of lying.

As I've already said I did get some benefit from calorie tracking. I think it's useful even just to learn how many calories are in your food. So of course, I don't hate CICO, but of course this kind of defensiveness is also very typical of CICO advocates.

If the defense of CICO epicycles is that "uh, actually sometimes people just burn extra calories for no reason", that's not that compelling. Isn't the point of CICO that it should always give you predictable results, and that if your results are wrong, it's because you made a mistake or are lying?

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It exists. But I think the CICO denial position puts way too much variability on metabolism and hunger cues and so on. Yes people do vary at bit in how much they burn. But I’d be surprised if the difference was more than 10% or so at normal levels of activity. Likewise with hunger it’s a fairly small variation unless you have a disease of some sort. It’s not going to make you gain fifty pounds over your normal weight range for someone your height. 20 lbs maybe, but that’s about it. If you’re conscious of your diet at all, those 20 lbs are preventable.

Of course I eat too much; looking at the people around me, I eat approximately 2-3 times what a non-fat person does. Even though almost everything I eat is healthy home-cooked food, I am obviously going to be fat at that rate.

But what can I do? If I don't eat that amount, I just go around feeling hungry all day, unable to enjoy anything or focus on any kind of productive work, until my willpower finally snaps and I scarf down whatever is at hand.

Which is exactly what set point theory predicts. Set point theory doesn't posit some kind of supernatural physical or biological mechanism; it merely argues that your brain will defend a given weight by making you hungry, cold, and lethargic (or, alternatively, full, sweaty, and hyperactive) until you reach that weight.

But what can I do? If I don't eat that amount, I just go around feeling hungry all day, unable to enjoy anything or focus on any kind of productive work, until my willpower finally snaps and I scarf down whatever is at hand.

I'm just curious, what's the longest consecutive time you've gone of eating less than that amount? This very thing used to be my experience - i.e. painful hunger pangs, unable to enjoy anything or focus on anything, not even entertainment, much less productive work - when I was obese until I decided to just try following a strict caloric deficit (in retrospect, it was probably an unhealthily severe sudden deficit, going from around 2,500-3,500 Calories/day to under 1,200 Calories/day, as a physically active early-20s 5' 9" male) for a week to see if there was any acclimation long-term, and I found that, after that week, keeping that deficit was almost trivially easy, to the extent that I just decided to keep at it for the next 4 months. I've seen enough examples of other people that I know that my experience isn't uncommon, but it certainly could be atypical, and I was wondering what, if anything, was your experience with such an experiment.

Not him, but I did basically the same thing you did, except I was less physically active, for about 15 months. The hunger pangs got less severe after a month or so, but never fully went away, and the cognitive problems (lack of focus, slower reasoning, less ability to subconsciously understand references) started half a week in and didn't stop until I started gaining the weight back.

But what can I do? If I don't eat that amount, I just go around feeling hungry all day, unable to enjoy anything or focus on any kind of productive work, until my willpower finally snaps and I scarf down whatever is at hand.

I used to be like this. Until I intentionally fasted. And I'm not even talking about serious fasting; 16:8 plus some minor daily exercise.

It was shocking how negotiable what seemed like a command was after a while.

I still glutton out, but I'm never in doubt now that I don't have to. It's an extremely useful exercise. You see it's just compulsion like with weed, porn or anything else except it's much better at fooling you that you're gonna die.

Something to consider trying. At least in my case, I build bad habits (no exercise, eating awful, non-satiating food) and then convinced myself this was some natural condition. It was "natural" in the same way my inability to deadlift or sprint is natural.

But what can I do? If I don't eat that amount, I just go around feeling hungry all day, unable to enjoy anything or focus on any kind of productive work, until my willpower finally snaps and I scarf down whatever is at hand.

Note that if you substituted food for any other substance or activity (alcohol, heroin, tobacco, masturbating to pornography) your reasoning would sound preposterous. It's very easy to tell yourself stories about how "this is just the way I am, so it's cruel to expect me to change". Probably every human defense mechanism is some variant upon this.

No, actually, I think I that's correct? In my experience, people who are addicted to alcohol or smoking or porn almost never stop, and the best defense is to avoid become addicted in the first place by not even trying the addictive habit in the first place (trivial for heroin and tobacco, harder for alcohol and porn, impossible for food).

Like, if you expect an alcoholic or drug addict or a masturbator to give up their vices, you are going to have a bad time; very few do. You are much better off deciding if you are willing to accept that person addiction and all or if you would rather cut them off from your life. Same for expecting a fat person to lose weight. Ignoring morality/desert, it requires a nearly superhuman level of willpower that the vast majority of people empirically do not have.

I find your motivated defeatism rather depressing. "Woe is me - through no fault of my own I was born with a metabolic set point incompatible with maintaining a healthy BMI AND developed an addiction to shitty fast food AND was born without the willpower necessary to overcome said addiction. Nothing I can do to change my lifestyle for the better, I just have to resign myself to my fate."

Look, I'm not going to claim that there's no hereditary component to willpower and everyone can do anything they choose to if they put their mind to it. But by your account, it doesn't sound like you've put a humongous effort into changing your lifestyle and finally decided it's not possible for you personally. Not "tried and found wanting" but "found difficult and left untried", as G.K. Chesterton would say.

I’m a competitive bodybuilder and spend 4-6 months of the year in a bulking phase where I’m consuming around 6000 calories per day. And 8 to 10 weeks prior to competitions in extremely rigid diets.

And from this experience, I can tell you there is no doubt in my mind that food is 100% addictive, with a higher and higher level of caloric richness needing to reach satiety. When I’m on a restrictive diet pre-completion, I’d treat myself to chewing on a piece of seed bread before spitting it out — and it tastes so delicious.

And, on the other extreme, when I am bulking with no dietary restrictions (other than hitting minimum macronutrient amounts), I’d do things order a 12 piece bucket of KFC chicken, simply because I become so addicted to highly satiating food than I’m unable to force myself through the amount of lean chicken, tuna or whatever I’d need to meet my macro goals.

My experience from when I cut over between diets — bulking, cutting, maintenance — is how I know food is an addiction. When I begin cutting, the first 2-3 weeks is hell. I am lethargic, my head hurts, constantly starving, I have very bad breath, irritable, etc. But like clockwork I get used to the diet and go from choking down cans of tuna and steamed vegetables to actually craving the food I’m eating, and at that point I’m mostly on auto-pilot. The reason I am able to consistently do it is not because i have extreme willpower. Rather I’ve done it so many times before, I know the switch is going to flip and so in that sense it’s a huge bargain: you can get a 12 week diet for the price of only a couple weeks of actual grind up front.

I am not a competitive bodybuilder and do not care at all about size or cosmetics (other than not being a fatass).

But I do like to lift heavier and heavier weights.

Do I really need 1g of protein per 1-lb lean bodyweight?

Also, I'd love a hot take on rep ranges.

When I begin cutting, the first 2-3 weeks is hell. I am lethargic, my head hurts, constantly starving, I have very bad breath, irritable, etc.

That's not addiction. You literally ARE starving; you are taking far less in terms of calories than you're burning. That's what cutting is.

But those feelings go away after the first few weeks of the cut and I can continue in a similar caloric deficit without those effects. I also begin to find the bland cutting food — boiled eggs, chicken breasts, steamed vegetables, rice, etc — much more enjoyable. Which interpret as breaking the addiction to the much more satiating cutting/maintenance foods.

But what can I do? If I don't eat that amount, I just go around feeling hungry all day, unable to enjoy anything or focus on any kind of productive work, until my willpower finally snaps and I scarf down whatever is at hand.

What would you do if you were an adherent of a religious tradition that called for fasting? The restriction isn't for the benefit of your own health, but rather divinely commanded, and mandates not less food permenantely, but no food for a day here and there, or when the sun is shining one month per year.

What would you do if you were an adherent of a religious tradition that called for fasting? The restriction isn't for the benefit of your own health, but rather divinely commanded, and mandates not less food permenantely, but no food for a day here and there, or when the sun is shining one month per year.

Eat as much as possible before the fasting period starts to tide me over. If that failed, I would just have to sneak food in while no one was watching and hope that G-d/Allah/Heavenly Father is merciful, much the same way I watched porn while I was still a Catholic and then prayed for forgiveness and the strength not to do it again (funny how that never worked).

Why do you think some people are able to lose weight, then?

Eating a lot is a habit. It is probably closer to an addiction. Eating less is very unpleasant and your body will fight you unless you satisfy it. Just like your body will fight you when you try to stop smoking.

I don't think you have a set point that demands you eat 2-3 times what a normal person does. I think you have a habit of eating that much, and if you stopped doing it, yes, you would feel like you are "starving" until either you give in, or your body adjusts to a lower intake.

I am not speaking hypothetically. I am a former fat person.

Why do you think some people are able to lose weight, then?

Independent upper and lower set points?

The more I hear about set point theory the more it sounds like just-so stories to explain why they can lose weight but I can't.

There may be something to it, but it looks as rigorous as most pseudoscientific theories, and I am suspicious of a theory that happens to be embraced mostly by fat acceptance activists.

I am suspicious of a theory that happens to be embraced mostly by fat acceptance activists.

I am suspicious of any hypothesis which allows people to think their cruellest instincts justifiable.

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It may well be embraced by fat acceptance activists, but it is also embraced by most of the field of nutrition science.

CICO, meanwhile, is only popular with laymen (who very often pair it with moral condemnation of fat people).

I don't think it's possible to look at a chart like this and conclude that what's really going on is a linear increase in laziness starting in the mid-C20th for no reason. Pick any profession full of intelligent, hardworking people (medicine, law, programming, high-level business) and you'll see similar proportions of fat people to the general population. While there are entire premodern cultures where nobody is fat at all.

CICO feels better than set-point theory in the same way that complaining about greedy landlords feels better than campaigning for YIMBY zoning reform. Most people will choose righteous outrage over real explanations if given the choice.

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Oh my, the epicycles keep on coming. How would one design an experimental protocol in order to verify/falsify such a hypothesis?

Why do you think some people are able to lose weight, then?

Malfunctioning set point regulator? Not sure. But as far as I know, the overwhelming majority of people fail to lose weight in the long-term.

Eating a lot is a habit. It is probably closer to an addiction. Eating less is very unpleasant and your body will fight you unless you satisfy it. Just like your body will fight you when you try to stop smoking.

The food addiction hypothesis fails to explain why skinny people find it just as hard to gain weight as fat people find it to lose weight. The set point model explains both.

why skinny people find it just as hard to gain weight

But no. Lift according to a good program and track your macros. You'll put on weight. It will happen.

But as far as I know, the overwhelming majority of people fail to lose weight in the long-term.

Yes, because they fail to change their CICO equation long term. They diet and/or exercise, lose some weight, then resume eating like they used to and stop exercising.

The food addiction hypothesis fails to explain why skinny people find it just as hard to gain weight as fat people find it to lose weight. The set point model explains both.

And yet in a post above you claimed that it's just like an addiction to smoking or porn or drugs, which we should not expect people to stop because it takes "superhuman willpower."

You are right that most people will not break their addictions, and most people will not lose weight. Because it's hard and unpleasant, and people do not like to do hard and unpleasant things. That doesn't mean it's impossible.

Me personally having mental illness makes me profoundly unsympathetic to others in that regard. I admit it is a personal flaw that I judge such people without the characteristic liberal softness: I have seen too many people get away with baldly unsympathetic behaviour because of trauma and I never feel more sympathy when it is brought up.

Even with the caprice of reality TV, the shit they do boggles the mind. (Stranger than fiction comes to mind.) And the food addictions on display (even when they know they are being observed and filmed, like in Secret Eaters) are so shameless, it is depicting the real thing, baldly and unsympathetically.

I don't think mental illness is an excuse - you are still responsible for getting yourself fixed. But people who literally aren't in control of themselves can't be expected to act "rationally."

Even with the caprice of reality TV, the shit they do boggles the mind.

Well, yes, if you screen people for their high levels of craziness, they will do crazy things on camera. My 600 Pound Life, for all that it purports to be "helping" its patients (Dr. Now probably really does care about his patients, at least somewhat) is very much a modern freakshow. "Point and laugh at the freaks and then wonder why they don't just stop stuffing their fat faces..."

If the threat of their imminent approaching deaths isn't enough to establish even a modicum of self control they're not really human beings, but automata who have lost their will to live. But it doesn't matter, in any case: because although they claim to have no self autonomy, they are very good at wheedling out benefits and favors from the people around them. It all smacks of bullshit in the end.

The number of people who weigh more than 600lbs is a vanishingly small number. It's not like in the Jersey Shore, where fake tanned sluts and himbos compete to be the stupidest on camera. Being very fat is comorbid with something very wrong with you and it's a pathology that is rapidly spreading in the Western world. They don't need to pick out the crazies and the exhibitionists: they just need to turn on the cameras and watch them do their distorted routines.

If the threat of their imminent approaching deaths isn't enough to establish even a modicum of self control they're not really human beings, but automata who have lost their will to live.

If it makes you feel very superior thinking that, okay. But people who are severely depressed, delusional, schizophrenic, and suffering from various other mental illnesses often do, in fact, lack even a modicum of self control. They are human beings. Broken human beings are still responsible for their actions. Yes, they can also be abusive and manipulative.

The reason we have more morbidly obese people is that (a) we have the medical technology to keep people alive in conditions that would have killed them sooner in earlier times; (b) we have a hyperabundance of extremely cheap, calorie-dense food made to be hyperpalatable; (c) we have no real mechanism to force people to stop self-harming in this way except in the most extreme circumstances.

And here's where I have a fundamentally different worldview than yours. There's a turn of phrase... 'makes you feel superior'. That would be incorrect.

That would imply that it is a subjective, egotistic feeling rather than objective fact.

There's nothing wrong with judging people better or worse than others. That may be a mortal sin to a progressive, liberal worldview, but to me it is simply the basis of any ideology that makes meritocratic judgement of worth. If you're a fat person because you were sexually abused or have some sort of mental illness or what have you... that's a sad story, but in the end, you're still being pushed off the bridge into the path of the runaway trolley.

I probably would not survive in the governing ethics of which I prefer... and that's fine with me. But that's probably too personal to debate on, so I'll chalk this one up to a disagreement of values.

We do have different worldviews, but not in the way you think.

Objectively, yes, you and I are probably "superior" to people who are eating themselves to death, at least on most axes.

What I think is a character flaw is feeling some kind of gratification at being such a superior person. Admit it is what it is; you like watching human trainwrecks. (That's why I watch the show.) You don't have to feel sorry for them or have empathy. But I wouldn't take pride in how superior I am or how it makes me a clear-eyed rationalist that I can deny them sympathy.

We wouldn't watch a show called '160 lb people eat healthy food in regular amounts', now, would we? :P

I believe what the West gets wrong is that it attempts to shift the pride of superiority to obviously inadequate people (and eliminate any pesky shame that came along with it.) But that fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of such emotions. You should feel pride in doing something good (and shame when you do something bad.) When you give pride to the weak-willed and shame the strong you upset the incentive structure of society and chaos ensues.

Or, to put it simply, false modesty benefits no one, and false pride harms everyone. To do otherwise to spare feelings is no good.

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So, in conclusion, I have come into belief that you should judge people for being obese. Not to say that all fat people are ignorant, entitled, and stupid. But they definitely have at least one of these traits, and should be avoided at all costs.

This seems a bit too strong. Massively obese, yeah, that tracks. But if someone's just over the line of technically obese, I'm a lot more likely to attribute that to stress and/or depression. It's a very easy thing to fall into, and getting out isn't as simple in practice as it's generally made out to be.

And for most people, that borderline is a wake-up call, yes.

I personally suffer from depression. Being fat didn't help with that. But for some people they look in a mirror and they think to themselves "I'm already fat, I might as well let myself go all the way" and that leads to all the pathologies of personality I just mentioned.

Right now, I'm going through a water fast, and it's difficult and uncomfortable. Losing weight is, in general, difficult and uncomfortable. The avoidance of discomfort and the pursuit of pleasure is the Western zeitgeist and I'd be damned if I let down my ubermenschian will to power by obeying the fickle whims of a decadent body.

Right now, I'm going through a water fast, and it's difficult and uncomfortable. Losing weight is, in general, difficult and uncomfortable. The avoidance of discomfort and the pursuit of pleasure is the Western zeitgeist and I'd be damned if I let down my ubermenschian will to power by obeying the fickle whims of a decadent body.

Yeah, okay, and I've done that too. The thing is that straightforwardly losing weight isn't difficult. Just don't eat for a week or two! That's actually fairly easy to do willpower-wise. At least, in comparison to what it will take to keep that weight off. That's not one big sustained decision, but countless smaller ones across much longer spans of time, and often in complex and inconvenient situations. I've known many, many people who lost substantial weight. I know extremely few who managed to keep it that way.

At least, in comparison to what it will take to keep that weight off. That's not one big sustained decision, but countless smaller ones across much longer spans of time, and often in complex and inconvenient situations.

I think this is why fad diets are effective regardless of what the fad actually is; they take the countless smaller decisions and roll them up into one big decision to follow [fad diet]. In 2020, in order to help to maintain my weight during lockdowns, I decided to experiment with keto (conclusion: really effective for me for losing fat while maintaining muscle. Not worth it in the long run for losing out on so many sweets and baked goods, but a good tool to have in the toolbox for future body recomposition goals), and I found that it made the decisionmaking when food shopping or eating very simple and easy on the mind. Does it have carbs? Then I don't buy it, and I don't eat it. I didn't have to wrack my brain or fight my willpower to justify or to make that decision, I just had to defer to the one big decision that I had made weeks/months back.

I'm going to have to go through the 'keep off that weight' dietary and lifestyle change phase eventually. I won't lie, that will probably be even more difficult than the fasting phase I'm doing right now.

But I both want and need to do it. And I hope I get through it.

Well, from experience, what you're going to find when you're done with the fast is that your body is intent on getting back to your pre-fast levels of fat. It will try to make this happen in both overt and subtle ways. Mostly just the urge to eat more often, or larger portions, than you did before. If you're not careful, this becomes the new normal and pretty soon you weigh more than you did at the beginning.

The only thing I've found that actually keeps me from gaining fat is lifting weights. There's a lot of broscience about this, and some real science too, but I can tell you it works for me.

Generally speaking, your body’s “whims” are its way of telling you what’s missing. Granted, its need are adapted to an ancestral environment that no longer exists and therefore may be maladaptive, but I don’t see the point of this ubermenschian will to power. Does it make you feel good to run roughshod over your body’s desires?

A little, yeah! Being a slave to bodily appetites is both unattractive and a perceived failure of my own character. It feels greatly satisfying to have a physical reminder of it.

Now, granted, I don't want to starve myself to death either. I have a epicurian taste for food. But I also want a long lifetime to enjoy such things, so the short-term discomforts will be worth the long term pleasures.

Ah, that makes more sense to me!

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