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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29331 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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By living in a society governed by a different morality, you were exposed to a less obisogenic environment, with smaller plates, less hyper palatable food, I probably should have mentioned this too, but also food choices that are less obisogenic and more satiating and less calorie dense probably too. You probably also mimicked how other people behaved and how they ate.

But why is the pollutants the issue and not the fact that the available food you had to choose from was less likely to make you fat? Because lower calories and more satiating per calorie. Less amount of oils probably too.

I ate vast quantities of extremely fatty and oily luxury cuisine, to the point that I had ¥9000 breakfasts five days in a row. I also had more than one occasion where native Japanese people told me that I was eating a lot. At the same time, I had much more oily and fatty food - ramen, A5 marbling wagyu, otoro tuna, bizarrely flavoured gourmet kit-kats, crepes, viennese coffee, montblancs, fried street food, etc. I still lost over 5kg in three weeks. At the same time, my subjective experience matched up to when I accidentally adopted a diet similar to the potato diet recommended by the chemical hunger crowd - I felt like I had vast amounts of energy and simply ate whenever I was hungry or wanted to taste something interesting. In contrast, when I used willpower to eat an incredibly restrictive diet consisting largely of unpalatable food (protein sparing modified fasting) I found myself with intense cravings and lethargy that I only overcame with the usage of caffeine and whatever other stimulants they included in preworkout powders). This is why I blamed the pollutants rather than any sort of moral difference - because that's how it matched up to what I actually experienced.

I recall reading that counterpiece and then the SMTM refutation of it - but I'm not too eager to rehash that argument given that I haven't bothered keeping up with the literature for the past two years. If there are any argumentative data/food nerds here, I'd love to read a serious discussion on this hypothesis! I took a quick glance at the SMTM blog and they are still doing research on the basis of the chemical hunger hypothesis, so I'm not too sure that it has been comprehensively defeated. But even if it was, my own personal experiences are not ones that match up to the moral failing hypothesis at all. That all said, I do think there is actually a moral element to societal influence on food choices. The biggest difference from my perspective was that if you try to eat cheaply in Japan without access to a kitchen you would largely be eating riceballs, seaweed, fish, soybeans and other largely healthy choices. Trying to do the same in western nations leads to eating some incredibly unhealthy products (HFCS, McDonalds, etc), and this is the kind of issue that I think a healthy government would step in and address - but god knows I wouldn't trust current western governments to do this well...

CICO is just a fact which we know from countless experiments of bodybuilders who count the calories they eat and from randomized control trials.

I ate vast quantities of extremely fatty and oily luxury cuisine, to the point that I had ¥9000 breakfasts five days in a row.

I guess this supports the fact that while the environment matters, people are also going to eat more out of their own desire and change the environment too. If there was a greater share of people with your desires over average Japanese, this would affect the Japanese food industry...

At the same time, my subjective experience matched up to when I accidentally adopted a diet similar to the potato diet recommended by the chemical hunger crowd - I felt like I had vast amounts of energy and simply ate whenever I was hungry or wanted to taste something interesting. In contrast, when I used willpower to eat an incredibly restrictive diet consisting largely of unpalatable food (protein sparing modified fasting) I found myself with intense cravings and lethargy that I only overcame with the usage of caffeine and whatever other stimulants they included in preworkout powders). This is why I blamed the pollutants rather than any sort of moral difference - because that's how it matched up to what I actually experienced.

French fries are a food that was associated with obesity but potatoes are otherwise a satiating food.

The best diet advice is against people going with very restrictive diets either in terms of removing food categories, or dropping drastically calories. Going more smoothly down but keeping at it and not reverting back, until you reach the point where it would be a good weight to maintain. Of course if you go very restrictive in diet you will have significant cravings.

There are people who have success with more restrictive diets, but it isn't necessary. And it necessitates more investigation and effort to get all the vital vitamins, minerals.

If you examine the history of food, there have been restrictive fad diets that were unnecessarily restrictive. I am more about wise self sacrifice and willpower relating to that.

Also, the willpower required to turn things around is different one someone becomes obese. Becoming that changes your appetite. It is still worth it, even if harder and there are also always ways you can fall down worse. Avoiding getting diabetes, heart disease, and other problems is well worth it, or reducing the severity. But it is even more important to do things right early, so people don't become obese to begin with.

Anyway, you decided to buy the meals you mention, and same previously. Surely, willpower plays a role in that? Although it was still bellow what you usually eat in the USA if you lost weight. Maybe you also were more active.

I guess a part of this has to do with having the right norms individually and collectively, and the term willpower might not capture it entirely, because it also relates with correct knowledge and action relating to that. While another part of it does relate with self sacrifice for one's own greater benefit but also a will to promote this norm in general. Moreover, like it or not, how much individuals decide to consume does affect the industry. And what the industry tries to market and promote, does affect the consumer.

The biggest difference from my perspective was that if you try to eat cheaply in Japan without access to a kitchen you would largely be eating riceballs, seaweed, fish, soybeans and other largely healthy choices. Trying to do the same in western nations leads to eating some incredibly unhealthy products (HFCS, McDonalds, etc), and this is the kind of issue that I think a healthy government would step in and address - but god knows I wouldn't trust current western governments to do this well...

Yes, I agree.

I took a long break from posting to go on holiday so feel free not to respond to this post in an ancient thread, but I wanted to reply anyway.

CICO is just a fact which we know from countless experiments of bodybuilders who count the calories they eat and from randomized control trials.

Yes, and I'm not disagreeing with it at all. This particular sort of diet intervention involves tackling the CO part. The claim is that these particular diets change some part of your internal chemistry in a way that prevents calories out from decreasing along with calories in. If this hypothesis is correct you can essentially get a free ECA stack with no side effects by shifting food consumption patterns in ways that prevent you from consuming environmental contaminants. That's absolutely worth investigating, and it would be regardless of whether CICO is true or not (I think it is, for the record).

Anyway, you decided to buy the meals you mention, and same previously. Surely, willpower plays a role in that?

In the sense that I actively wanted to eat tasty food that I could only purchase and consume during my limited time in Japan, yes. I wasn't paying any attention to my diet.

Although it was still bellow what you usually eat in the USA if you lost weight. Maybe you also were more active.

I don't live in the USA (but I do live in a FVEYS nation so not much of a difference). At the same time, I stopped going to the gym and working out while I was there - so while I did walk a lot more, I'm not sure how the total amount of exercise changed beyond losing the lifting portion.

Ultimately the core of my disagreement with your view of willpower being the determinant is that I have lost weight both through a lengthy and sustained act of willpower (protein sparing modified fasting + intense exercise routine), and through a dietary intervention that required no willpower at all - and in fact actually required me to exert mental effort/energy in order to eat enough junk food that my weight was stable rather than falling. There was a very clear subjective difference in my inner experience between the two, and the second felt a lot "healthier" - I had more energy and was more capable in a variety of ways when going through that second diet, and having gone through both types of intervention I'm actively trying the potato diet because I found that something equivalent worked that much better for me.

There are studies that show that the addition of vinegar in a carb rich meal lowers glucose and insulin response in healthy individuals, which is associated with weight loss.

My understanding is that Japanese food has a lot of vinegar in it, which may have contributed. I don’t know if it would offset 9000 calorie meals.

I had a lot of obviously bad food that didn't have any vinegar in it - but it probably was present. That said the meals themselves were 9000 yen, not calories (big difference).

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