What is a realistic path to this? Being from Europe I visited US last year and was horrified at the quality of your food. You see a lot of documentaries/youtube videos/etc... discussing the problem, but how do you even go about this?
We have good food, but you won't find it on "The Easy Path."
The Easy Path is that gentle encouragement to hit up Chipotle for lunch, because it's "right there."
The Easy Path says dinner's hard and you've had a long day, so get something simple, like take-out or microwave.
The Easy Path is entropy. The Easy Path is self-care over struggle. The Easy Path is simple carbs shown on prominent display in store shelves. The Easy Path is advertising.
Hitting the gym isn't on The Easy Path, but forgetting to cancel your gym membership is.
These days, big food companies love "The Easy Path" because it's so easy to commoditize, it's the "Path that Americans are Expected to Take." For financial stewards, being on The Easy Path turns lack of willpower into your ally.
On the other hand, getting good food in the US requires passing the marshmallow test: you have to meal prep, or you have to shop around the sides, or you have to get something on the salad menu. You have to say no to advertising. You have to expend willpower, the most limited of resources to the average American. You have to Go Hungry or Suffer, or have An Upset Stomach. You frequently have to spend more money or time.
Semaglutides are not currently on The Easy Path. Maybe they will be someday. I personally doubt that, because putting GLP-1 on The Easy Path would require big food companies to rethink their entire portfolio.
But you're not wrong in that they could be Easy Path-ajdacent. The dialectic would shift: food companies would shift around to be Organic and Nutritious and Less Calories and find other ways to stay on The Easy Path. Sugar and fat's addictiveness is highly Easy Path-enabling, and that's a pretty big vacuum to fill.
I think you're making this sound harder than it is.
If you count calories and stick to a budget, you will lose weight, even if those calories come from deep-fried fast food. Sure, it's good to eat more whole fruits and vegetables, and you should, but weight loss doesn't require some kind of Edenic perfection. Stick to a calorie budget and you will lose weight, the end.
We can add some second and third order provisos, sure. The next tip would be to go low carb. And to keep a spreadsheet with calorie numbers for everything you eat. Track what you're doing.
But basically, if you eat 1500 kcal/day for nine months, you will be much thinner. We don't have to make it harder than that. It works. Perfection is not required.
If we're talking about this as a public health issue, then I agree with you. You can't really expect much of people as a herd or mass.
(Hell, look at the state of elections.)
If we're talking about this as individual, rational people, though, then it's different. You can absolutely maintain a reasonable weight if you just attend to it.
2.
There's actually some knowledge embedded in the "count to 1500", which, if you're not in the habit of thinking about, may be surprising. Specifically, the kcal amounts themselves.
Say you just go with the flow of society, and you eat "normally" without thinking about what you're doing:
You wake up, and you have something marketed as "a meal" for breakfast. A breakfast sandwich can easily be 550 kcal. If you add a venti latte to this, especially one with sugar, then you could easily add another 250 for that. Now you're at 800 kcal just for breakfast.
Then consider lunch. Even a "small" meal from a healthy salad place, like Sweetgreen (which is expensive), is going to be like 900 kcal. Say that's what you eat. Now you're at 1700 kcal.
The afternoon comes, and you have two chocolate-chip cookies. Two cookies isn't excessive, right? Just a little treat. But each one is probably 120 kcal. So that's 240 kcal. Now you're at 1940 kcal.
Finally you have dinner. Some microwaved thing, relatively small. It's probably like 600 kcal. So now we're at over 2,500 kcal for the day.
Everything you did in the course of that day was relatively normal. Probably only the venti latte at breakfast was obviously excessive. But now you're substantially over your calorie budget.
Now, 2,500 kcal is still salvageable. Every mile you walk on flat ground is about 100 kcal. If you live in the city, you could easily have walked a mile and a half during your commute to work, and another mile when you stepped out for lunch, and a mile and a half on your way back, giving you four miles. You're almost at breakeven. Just need a little more exercise, and you'll maintain your current weight.
(In the burbs, though, you probably drove to all these places and now it's on you to go to a gym, which is a pain in the butt.)
Anyway, my point is, if you weren't attending to all this, how would you know? You'd probably just be doing all these habits without thinking about them. Most parts of this routine seem pretty reasonable. But you'd still be getting fat. Because you're going with the flow instead of counting.
So, there's a little (easy) knowledge involved, but mostly it's not an issue of intellectual ability, it's a matter of attention.
>The Easy Path says dinner's hard and you've had a long day, so get something simple, like take-out or microwave. The Easy Path is entropy. The Easy Path is self-care over struggle.
If you see this sort of food as "self-care" then that's where the war has been lost.
>or you have to shop around the sides
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who enjoys this. Discovering, for example, the versatility and cost-effectiveness of skim milk powder was a real game changer for me. Similarly for dried legumes and fruits.
The Easy Path is a meal service like Factor that delivers healthy food directly to your door step.
The Easy Path is signing up for a fitness class on a regular schedule and baking it into your morning routine.
The Easy Path is not buying extra snacks - just don't have them laying around the house for you to eat when you're bored.
The Easy Path is the path of least resistance. However, you have some agency over the environment you create for yourself, so that path of least resistance is to some degree under your control.
Get ground beef in the supermarket, it’s cheap and takes 7 minutes to cook. If that’s all you eat you can’t be fat and out of shape. You also won’t be hungry.
At some point blaming society isn’t going to cut it.
At some point "have willpower" isn't going to cut it. That point was decades ago.
Blaming society sounds fatalistic, but yes we absolutely can change society. There are mechanisms to do it, and the first step to utilizing any of them is people getting pissed off about the state of things and talking to other people about how pissed off they are about it.
I’ve done plenty of grinding it out in my life with no energy or time to spare.
Even in that place you can do better than ground beef.
Get an instant pot and invest in some rudimentary cooking skills. I’ve spent a whole year making variations on the same dish in 15 minutes, using that cooking as end-of-day stress relief. Shopping for the same handful of things once a week.
It wasn’t fine dining but it was healthy, cheap, and a few steps up from ground beef. Come now.
I love fatty meat and salt. I can’t think of many things better than that. It’s also the only staple us and our ancestors have eaten for millions of years.
I think the instant pot is too imprecise a tool for cooking by recipe, it’s for speed and convenience. I’ll improvise a curry with what’s on hand, sometimes the result is fine and sometimes it’s great :)
It’s not the only thing. You can eat any meat, eggs, or many dairy products. Probably most fruit is fine too, although I don’t eat carbs myself.
Yes, all the processed grains and seed oils and artificial sweeteners and chemicals should never have been invented. But I’m not too fussed about that. What I can do is come here and write these comments about the diet that changed my life for the better. If only one person who reads them tries it out, I will already have succeeded.
The US is a huge country (9,833,520 square kilometers!), so I find it curious that such generalization can be made about the food available here, or even the eating habits of 334,914,895 humans. I could say that I visited Amsterdam 2 years ago and I was shocked with the quality of the food.
But I would never do that, since I mostly ate at the Red Light District, and I couldn't possibly generalize the country eating habits with stores in a major tourist area.
Maybe I'm too European to understand why not, but seems to me that regulations around food and what companies are allowed to put into it is really helpful in avoiding companies from just stuffing whatever down people's throat.
There's plenty of high quality food, you just have to know where to look. For example, come to the Bay Area and check out Whole Foods and any number of high-end restaurants.
That's overkill. There are very marginal health benefits to eating organic watercress vs. eating whatever dark leafy green is currently on sale at the discount supermarket.
The problem isn't that people go to supermarkets and they can't find any healthful ingredients to cook with. The problem is that they go to supermarkets and pass those over in favor of convenience foods that have been optimized for "craveability" [1].
GLP-1 drugs can alter this behavior by reducing food cravings. Someone who's no longer craving the most craveable food can make more objective by-the-numbers buying decisions the next time they go grocery shopping.
was in greece for three months. the quality of the BASIC fruits and vegetables at the regular local market down the street from where I was staying was on par with wholefoods. It was surreal how cheap it was to eat HEALTHY.
Almost any ethnic grocery store will do since they cater to immigrant communities that are likely to be lower income. Here in SoCal some are cheaper than others but they're all way cheaper than Ralphs/Vons/Trader Joes/Costco/etc (I don't shop at WalMart so I'm not sure how they compare)
There are also native stores that are increasingly entering into low cost produce like Grocery Outlet and then there are the usual like Food4Less but they tend to eventually move upmarket.
Why is the quality of food in Europe so much worse than southeast Asia?
Because you guys are way, way, way fatter than e.g. the Japanese.
Back on topic -- we have excellent food in the US, but regulations allow for highly processed crap to be sold too. Pretty sure most of the crappy processed foods are easily available in Europe, too.
eu and canada have stringent laws on advertising to children, and laws on nutrition and additives to their products
even things like bread in the US have an insane amount of sugar
but the other reason is suburban/car culture & zoning, which means more hypermarkets and shopping not every few days for fresh food but every week or two for more processed food that lasts longer because going to the store is a bigger PITA than a quick 5 min walk to the neighborhood stores; which also means mroe walking rather than driving, another area of calorie burning and lean muscle maintenance which maintains high metab
The first thing that would help is actually having a realistic discourse about food, and not the idiotic - "You shouldn't be eating processed food, its not good for you".
Like most of the food that we eat is not really that bad. Its not optimal for sure, especially for sedentary lifestyles, but a lot of the health problems are not directly tied into the actual food, rather the over-consumption of it, and passing down of bad genetics (for example, children of obese people are more likely to be obese).
European obesity tripled in the last 40 years as well, despite higher quality of food.
