
It's Time For a New Paradigm About Obesity - prawn
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/
======
masonic
Already posted 5 times this week under the actual title, "Everything You Know
About Obesity Is Wrong".

------
tcj_phx
I voted down throwaway8879's comment below, then I noticed they had a more
substantial comment in an earlier submission of this link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18037552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18037552)

From throwaway8879's earlier comment:

 _> A calorie is a calorie. If you're overweight, consume fewer calories._

I just posted about soybean oil's miraculous inflammatory properties [1].
Soybean oil has the same number of calories as butter. Humans have eaten
butter for thousands of years. Butter is stable at room temperature. Soybean
oil was used to make paint in the early 20th century [2], then industry
figured out how to "refine" it to make it edible. All calories are _NOT_
equivalent.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054952)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil)

The goal of this article is to point out that the pontifications of pseudo-
experts like throwaway8879 are worthless to people who would like to lose
weight. The "advice" of most conventional medical professionals to their
overweight patients is similarly non-helpful.

The article also points out that Science has figured out a few clues that
would help people find weight loss easier to attain. One of the insights I
noted early in the article is how people's metabolism is very dynamic: when a
person eats less than they usually do, their body burns fewer calories. My
understanding is that this is one of our species' survival mechanisms, just in
case a famine is coming on.

From the friends I've had who've successfully lost weight, I suggest that
their weight problem started with stressful childhoods. One fellow was rather
chubby when I knew him in college; he recently commented about growing up on
food stamps. When he graduated he got married and started a business. At some
point he realized he didn't need to eat so many Twinkies, started bicycling,
and has lost a lot of weight. (I don't know what order his transformation came
in).

Another friend similarly had a stressful childhood - her family picked on her,
and she was always broke. At one point over the past ten years, she realized
she had weight she wanted to lose, changed her strategies for eating and
exercising, figured out how to deal with her stresses, started her own
business that's now doing pretty well... She's now lost most of what she wants
to lose.

Two years ago a new acquaintance told how she was going to get weight-loss
surgery. She'd gained and lost her excess weight several times. "When did you
gain it originally?" It was associated with the birth of her first child...
She wasn't that into the child's father. She'd already had her mind made up on
the surgery, and she has lost a good bit of weight, but ... as the book title
goes, "feelings buried alive never die". It is always better to address the
root cause of a condition than to treat it symptomatically.

I try to eat nutrient-dense foods. This means avoiding beans, refined wheat,
most other grains, and most refined oils. These "foods" have calories but
fewer of the supporting vitamins and minerals that people require for better
health. My staples are milk, juices, eggs, potatoes, tomatoes... liver... bone
broth... cheese... etc. Sometimes I make my own whole-wheat bread in a bread
machine. I do make an exception to my no-grain policy for white rice, because
billions of Asian people probably aren't entirely wrong. I'm working on some
dandelion roots for a constant stream of free green vegetables.

Yeah, the article could be shorter. But the harmful media prattle about an
"obesity epidemic" has been ongoing for decades. The problem is solved, but
there's too much profit in keeping people overweight. IMHO, the various
pseudo-experts can't gracefully retract their decades of bad advice, so the
media's usual strategy is to continue their "blame-the-victim" coverage of the
problem. This article is at least a step in the right direction.

------
throwaway8879
No it isn't. There's only one paradigm: eat less and exercise more.

~~~
QuantumAphid
For weight loss the devil is in the details, so your paradigm is far too broad
to be useful.

For example, eating less is important, but eating too little is counter-
productive and can do long-term damage to your basal metabolic rate.

Exercise is good for overall cardio fitness, muscle tone, joint health, and
some excess calorie expenditure, _but_ your body will not allow you to
exercise away too much energy too quickly. Too much of a good thing here and
you can end up damaging your BMR, you will feel exhausted/injured and your
body will break-down muscle as much as fat.

[https://www.vox.com/2018/1/3/16845438/exercise-weight-
loss-m...](https://www.vox.com/2018/1/3/16845438/exercise-weight-loss-myth-
burn-calories)

Your paradigm sounds a lot like what the contestants on the TV show The
Biggest Loser did, and the vast majority of those dieters damaged their
metabolisms and yo-yo'd back to their former obese selves.

