That's a trivial claim about any medication that changes behavior. You can achieve the same thing that the medication does by "just" having different behavior.
I eat almost zero processed foods and very little sugar - mostly from fruit. I shop exclusively on the perimeter of the grocery store and eat at a restaurant maybe once a month, with all my meals cooked at home. I try my best to limit portions.
I have been overweight my entire life. I have successfully lost weight with up to eight months of calorie restriction, so my willpower is just fine, thank you. I have always gained it back, and you calling me out for some kind of moral turpitude is not helpful.
Your "eat like an adult" finger waggling is condescending, and claiming anyone who thinks obesity is more complex than "just eat better food, bro" is anti-intellectual and anti-science is just insulting - and not particularly "pro science" either.
In 8 months of losing 2 pounds a week, you would have lost roughly 64 pounds. You could have been losing more than that which is common on diets where added sugar is removed. But you're talking to someone who has worked with people with class 3 obesity and has seen the weight successfully stay off.
You're omitting details. You simply didn't change your eating habits. Statistically, this detail you shared is also overwhelmingly the documented reason why people fail to keep off weight. Almost entirely, people who reside in higher classes of obesity have no idea what their relative consumption habits are in comparison to those with lower BMIs.
This may come as a surprise to you, but most other countries where obesity is not a problem, most sugar consumption is also from fruit and these peoples' diets _don't_ contain anywhere near the amount of added sugar an American diet does. This isn't a special thing to point out, you just think it is because you have no other frame of reference.
There are a lot of statistics in dietary behavioral studies and dietary reinforcement that are mostly uninteresting because, frankly, people omit details.
You can lose considerable weight at speeds that are actually not recommended simply by dropping added sugar from American diets. So much so that you would need to taper off this removal to stay around 2 pounds of weight loss a week instead of dropping this consumption pattern cold turkey.
The biggest difficulty in sourcing food materials or eating out is that we have sugar in everything. We have added sugar in things that in other countries you would have never added sugar into to begin with.
The reinforcement habit is directly tied to food reward, sugar consumption, and ghrelin production. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying and is simply refuting what we have come to understand about food science over the years.
And frankly, we as a people have not yet completely matured out of the phase of producing or accepting low-fat foods being replaced with high sugar content. Plenty of other nations never had this problem at all, never inherited it, and as a result, don't have to grow out of it.
It is staggering how much of our food is incompatible with healthy weight homeostasis, and all of our common supermarkets absolutely work against you unless you are otherwise taught differently.
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Edit:
If you're baking bread for your family every day, even without added sugar, and you don't see the problem here, I don't know how anyone can help you.
I'm not calling you a liar. I said you were omitting details. You didn't mention that you're frequently eating carbs. Now you mention that you're baking, and presumably eating, bread every day.
I bake bread for my family every day because I can't get bread in Canada that has no sugar. I'm aware of how insidious sugar is.
You obviously deal with a lot of obesity that is caused by excessive sugar consumption. Your conclusion - and smuggled assumption - is that all obesity is caused by sugar. This is trivially refuted by finding obese people in non-high-sugar societies, or from a time period before sugar became ubiquitous.
Calling me a liar does not make your position stronger.
Response edit: I have four school aged children who get a sandwich for lunch every day. It takes no time at all for a family of six to go through a 650g loaf of bread, and it doesn't require overeating - I'm the only one in my family with a weight problem, and I bake the bread I don't eat it. Your assumption that everyone in the world is exactly like you is truly breathtaking.
> This is trivially refuted by finding obese people in non-high-sugar societies, or from a time period before sugar became ubiquitous.
Those people definitely existed, but were pretty rare. Maybe you are one of them. Statistically, probably not.
> I bake bread for my family every day because I can't get bread in Canada that has no sugar. I'm aware of how insidious sugar is.
That is definitely way, way better than anything store bought, so it's great that you are doing that. However, even without added sugar, bread will start converting to sugar immediately after being in contact with saliva(and will continue once the pancreas enters the picture). So you are eating sugar every day still, possibly quite a lot of it.
I had to severely decrease bread consumption, as well as anything containing simple carbs, to decrease my insulin resistance.
>Those people definitely existed, but were pretty rare. Maybe you are one of them. Statistically, probably not.
Mexico has approximately the same per-capita sugar consumption as Italy, Spain and France, yet the obesity rate exceeds that of the U.S. Norway has 50% more per-capita sugar consumption than the US and very little obesity. I don't think eating little sugar or refined food, yet being overweight makes me a statistical anomaly at all.
I'm not claiming some kind of magic variation in base metabolic rates. I'm only saying that it is too simplistic to point at refined sugar and say that a complex problem has that one simple cause. (And that to solve it one need only learn to be an adult).
I don't eat bread by the way, I bake it for my family. I do revert to eating potatoes and pasta though, which is no doubt to blame for my weight fluctuations. My irritation in this discussion comes only from the ridiculous claim that if I were only to eat like a grown-up for two weeks, food cravings would disappear and my problems would be solved.
Mexican cuisine employs large amounts of fat, directly, or in the form of cheese. Take a trip to Italy, Spain, or France. It's a very different eating atmosphere. The portions and ingredients aren't comparable, and in Europe, there are greater food protections that straight up don't exist in North America.
Carrefour et Monoprix ne ressemblent pas du tout à ceux de WalMart, etc. You can't compare them. Their food selection makes ours in the states look embarrassing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were the same for Canada. It's superior on all fronts.
It isn't too simplistic to look at sugar or general carbohydrates and say, this ingredient has the highest reconstitution of habit developing behaviors compared to that of any other macronutrient. Your body's ability to reinforce food habituation compared to any other macronutrient on a graphed scale makes every other macro look like peanuts. It's sugar. It's carbs. It's a fact. It's scientifically proven. I implore you to do the reading yourself. Fat also has a high recidivation rate, but it pales in comparison to carbohydrates.
For your own health and the risk that you'll tell others otherwise as well, just dismiss me and read these studies yourself.
It's that easy, and the reality is that no one adjusts for it. Your supermarkets don't care and all of the people around you probably don't realize it either. It's cultural. It's in your beer. It's in your coffee creamer. It's everywhere.
It is the dietary equivalent of global warming denial. Seriously. I have watched people with class 3 obesity drop 40 pounds in one month, which is terribly hard on your body and not recommended, by immediately switching off high carb, high fat diets.
Yes, your food cravings do truly, really, disappear within a span of 2-4 weeks. Within 30 to 60 days, people can and do form rejection habits with little documented "willpower" in the same way these individuals using GLP-1 hormones do.
Because it's the same activation vector. You increase incretins production through rich protein consumption. People suffer from the effects that you describe because of leptin resistance. For people in extreme weight class categories, you don't get off after a few months, fat cells stay in your body for years in dormant, reduced volume form.
Of course I eat carbs when I shouldn't. Not the bread, but I eat potatoes sometimes, and too much fruit. I'm not denying that I eat too much.
The point is you claim that if we gluttons would just cut out sugar for 2 weeks and learn to be an adult, our appetites and cravings would disappear. That's nonsense, and your dismissal of data that doesn't fit your narrative makes your accusations towards others of being anti-science both hollow and ironic.
2 lbs a week is a 1000 calorie per day deficit. My loss was closer to half a kilo a week. I have fluctuated between 85 and 210 kg since I was 16 or so. I am now 54.
Of course I am not saying my body violates the laws of thermodynamics. After some time I succumb to cravings and begin overeating again, a bit at first and then more. I am not denying this is behaviour driven. My only point with the fruit aside was that I'm not consuming my sugar from chocolate milk or sugary breakfast cereal, not that I think fructose is exempt.
But to suggest that all I have to do is eat healthfully for a few weeks and my cravings will be gone is infuriating. I have eaten healthfully for years and years, and eaten at a calorie deficit (of healthy food) for many months at a time. And the cravings NEVER go away. I always go to bed thinking of food.
Maybe I should get a nutrition degree and then my body will conform to what your textbooks say should happen.
Could you provide some of those papers? I'm interested on what you are saying, but I am not able to find what you are mentioning using the link you provided.
It goes on and on and on. In lab mice, it has been shown you can alter production in as little as 10 days. Human hormone production has similar turn around times.
Have you considered that maybe it is an evolutionary trait that it is hard to do certain things? That the people who can expend the effort and discipline, perhaps have a better configuration than those that can’t or don’t?
The exact same argument can be applied to literally any medical issue, and it is a pointless one.
Someone has an elevated risk of skin cancer due to their genetics? Probably an evolutionary trait that it is more likely for some people to get skin cancer within their lifetime. That doesn’t mean that using sunscreen and providing those people with related medical care (if the need arises) is some crime against nature and will end up hurting evolutionary prospects of the human race.
> Someone has an elevated risk of skin cancer due to their genetics? Probably an evolutionary trait that it is more likely for some people to get skin cancer within their lifetime.
The question is how a trait fares in the modern world.
Maybe a trait was useful to an ancestor but not to you today trying to navigate a calorie rich world of convenience. Just like a trait useful to a nomadic hunter might work against you when you're expected to sit at a desk job if you want to make the money necessary to fulfill your ambitions.
It may very well be the case that we end up medicating away traits that were useful at some point in our lineage but not today. I just don't see how it matters much beyond the thought exercise.
Weird that the ones skinnier foreigners with a “better configuration” get genetically altered (I guess) to a worse configuration when they move to the US, then.
hilariously, the toxic food companies are worried that ozemic will kill their profits. Maybe the pharma industry can fight the food industry conglomerates.
My point is that skinny populations don’t seem to be skinnier than the US population due to greater genetically-backed willpower (better “configuration”). At least, if it’s a factor, it’s overwhelmed by other factors, it seems.
