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You don't need official diets for CICO it's self evident. Reduce food consumption and/or increase activity until you lose weight. Still haven't lost weight? Decrease/increase.
Problems:
People tend to lack self control. If you had self control you wouldn't be fat.
People tend to over-weight the activity part. So really just forget about CO and reduce CI until you start to lose weight. See problem one.
Expand to why you're poor and struggle with addiction.
"you're poor because you don't earn enough" A lot of dieting advice is similarly circular or unhelpful. Thankfully we now have GLP-1 drugs, which seem to work for many people
There's a big distinction between obesity and poverty:
To become not-poor, you need to both do things you are currently not doing and do them in a way that gets other people to give you money for those things you do. You're adding behaviors, and you have to socially coordinate.
To become not-fat, you only need to not do a thing (eat). It requires no social coordination whatsoever, it requires no additional action, you literally only have to choose to not pick up the fork.
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Be careful with that poison, I'm reading some horror stories about people going blind on that shit. And the media is staying as silent as possible for that one.
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No, you're poor because you don't do relatively simple things. And yes, hopefully GLP-1s help a ton.
the SS was written a long time ago when a HS degree was good enough. now you need college
So it's down from 97% to what?
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Its well known that certain medications lead to weight gain: do you believe they do so because they reduce the self control of those who take them? Does hyperthyroidism cause significant increases in self-control, and does hypothyroidism erode self-control? Do GLPs work because they increase the individual's self-control?
If not, then factors other than self-control are at play.
Those conditions (likely) don't change the "amount" of self control you have, but they do change how much your desire to eat is weighted in the semi-conscious calculation of what you end up choosing to do. Self-control is your ability to over-ride unconscious, animal instincts in favor of conscious choices. In the case of a medical condition that makes you hungrier, it does in fact require more self control to not eat more, but that doesn't mean that it isn't ultimately a question of self control that determines whether or not you eat more.
Hypothyroidism typically reduces appetite, yet you still gain weight despite eating less. Similarly, hyperthyroidism typically increases appetite, yet you lose weight even though you're eating more. Thyroid hormones are needed to make a lot of metabolic processes run, and if you don't have enough (hypothyroidism) then your temperature goes down and a dozen other processes don't work well and stop using up calories, so most of what you eat ends up in fat storage. If you have too much (hyperthyroidism) then your body temperature goes up, a dozen metabolic processes go into overdrive, and you lose weight despite eating more.
You could argue that someone with hypothyroidism could still use self-control to eat less and not gain weight, which is technically true. They'd probably end up in the hospital, but they could do it.
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I know it wouldn't be The Motte if it wasn't 10,000 words of caveats. Yes, these are exceptions that apply to a minuscule number of people, yet a bunch of people use them to make excuses for why they're fat.
It would not surprise me one bit that certain drugs and conditions reduce self-control and other's increase it. Some things make desired outcomes easier and some things make them harder. If you've got lots of self-control and you get some condition or start some drugs that make it harder to keep weight off, reduce CI until you stop gaining weight.
I would bet you think I have some normie conception of self-control: "self-control is easy! Just don't eat." Nope, self-control is really hard, and you're probably mostly born with it, like IQ. Can a midwit get a PhD in math from Harvard...? Well, are they black? No? Very unlikely.
Additionally hilarious when the majority of people making these arguments, if confronted with a similar 'transness is valid since super rare hormonal dysfunction that impacts 1-in-2-million people' would instantly side on the yes but side whilst since it's about their own bodyweights are suddenly reality relatavists.
I'm reminded of a twitter thread from Big Yud ages ago on similar lines about why he was unable to lose weight. Can't find it on a quick search but it was a similar matter of 'rationalist attempts to rebut CICO when it's fairly obvious he just likes eating and doesn't like exercising'. A post meming on him from back then https://x.com/MorlockP/status/1657098074139811876
I've personally struggled with my weight depending on a bunch of factors, swinging 20-30kgs either direction depending on circumstances but ultimately CICO's the only way I've ever been able to lose weight and generally I gain when I'm distracted by other things to the point of letting go of either moderation or exercise.
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