The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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My hypothesis is that the calorie/willpower model is appealing because it allows people to be moralistic. Fat people aren't very nice to look at, but if you can tell yourself that they chose to look like this because they wanted to be lazy and gluttonous, well then you can justifiably dislike them.
Me and girlfriend have had this conversation a few times, and what's fascinating is that she doesn't seem to have any particular model of what causes obesity. Instead, when presented with my version of the setpoint hypothesis (personally I think it's the vegetable oils), she reaches into a grab bag of other explanations (laziness, shift work, hyperpalatable food, snacking, processed food) but never settles on one and refuses to assign a weighting to any of them.
Nothing about set point theory suggests that people don't get fat by being lazy and gluttonous. Even if it absolves people of blame for failing to lose weight, they still get fat through sloth and gluttony.
I guess that could technically be correct. But then it just begs the question as to why sloth and gluttony increased linearly in the latter half of the 20th century at the exact time as countries adopted seed oils into their diet.
If it were true, we would also expect to see people who work longer hours get less obese, because they are demonstrably less slothfull than their peers. We don't see this. Instead we see people who are objectively smart and hard working (for example, medical students) getting fatter just like everyone else.
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