Is Obesity 100% OPTIONAL?

[EIRE24]

I have met lots of severely underweight ectomorphs, with terrible metabolisms and constant mood swings, who try to reinvent their dysfunction as a virtue and accomplishment. It's the other end of the "beautiful at any size" spectrum.

A very close friend of mine is 5'10" and has never weighed more than 140 lbs. He developed psychological issues with food at a young age, and as we got older, he started suppressing his appetite with black coffee and cigarettes in order to avoid eating, never ate breakfast, etc. He couldn't change his habits, partly because he didn't want to give up on his lean, "shredded" look, so in his early 20s he burned out spectacularly. I talk to him on the phone every once in a while, but he's still stuck in our hometown, with nothing really going on in his life, and he strikes me as the perfect exemplar of what happens to even a competent, intelligent person if they have to deal with a chronic unavailability of energy.

Is he still extremely lean? Sad to see people living like this. More to life than being ripped.

 

[rei]

Obesity is a result of hormonal dysregulation. The single most damaging thing modern culture does is eating constantly. What you eat is not as crucial as how you eat. The base metabolic rate can be 700-3000 calories per day, so it obviously is no use to count calories.

Of course there are obese people with a disease that causes the dysregulation, but these are a minority. Most people cause their condition by their eating habits.

 

[Ulysses]

Is he still extremely lean? Sad to see people living like this. More to life than being ripped.

Yes, and he’s also still full of resentment and crippled by learned helplessness. I told him about Ray Peat and he was doing it for a while, but stopped, and couldn’t give a sensible answer when I asked why. I think it scared him to start feeling well after so many years of rationalizing his maladaptive behaviors. I know first-hand that the sense of loss about years of poor health really only sets in when health is finally regained...

The other problem is that our home town is not a good place, so any increases in one’s well-being there can actually cause psychological difficulties, because the better you feel in a dysfunctional environment, the more you’re actually at odds with it.

 

[YourUniverse]

The most brilliant person I know is 6'0 135lbs, abundance of energy. It can work a number of ways

 

[Ulysses]

The most brilliant person I know is 6'0 135lbs, abundance of energy. It can work a number of ways

Yes, but surely they eat enough food to support their activities. The guy I was talking about was not only that thin, but would also go a day without eating or have 500-1000 calories at the most.

 

[Runenight201]

When I see obese people I do have a lot of compassion for them, because I don't see them as people who willingly choose to be obese, but rather as unfortunate victims of Western lifestyle. The vast majority of people weren't obese in antiquity, mainly because the peasants didn't have access to frequent, calorically dense, anti-thyroid, anabolic food such as muscle meat. Add in the total absence of PUFA anything, and you have some scarily thin populations. Humans have always eaten what's available, which has led to our success, but has now been our demise, in the greedy capitalization of the food industry, trading human health for profit. If you go to third world countries, you won't need to carry a bottle of Vitamin E when you travel, because you can stop at a roadside restaurant, and you'll get rice, vegetables, some soup broth, and some meat. Can't do that in Western countries. Even the most basic meal will have to have added oils, it just makes the food taste so much better. Better tasting food, more profits, and that's the model which has crippled America in terms of health.

For your average obese person, the best thing you can do is to tell them to stop eating out, prepare all their own meals, eat natural, avoid seed oils, and decrease the amount of muscle meats. And always eat to satiation. Always. Even Ray Peat has said that for losing weight, it's best to avoid the muscle meats. Hopefully, once they take the responsibility of preparing their own food again, they'll start drawing connections between appetite, energy, and vibrant health, and take an active approach to testing different modalities that finally allow them to heal. But it has to start with empowering the individual. Then obesity becomes a choice.

 

[tara]

For your average obese person, the best thing you can do is to tell them to stop eating out, prepare all their own meals, eat natural, avoid seed oils, and decrease the amount of muscle meats.

I can't back this up with definite studies, but I'd be wondering whether some people get into imbalances less from excessive muscle meats than from excesses of wheat, refined sucrose, and seed oils, maybe also corn and soy, devoid of sufficient or balanced protein, minerals and vitamins to make good use of all the calories, and still craving more because the diet is deficient in some things they are needing?

 

[danielbb]

I can't back this up with definite studies, but I'd be wondering whether some people get into imbalances less from excessive muscle meats than from excesses of wheat, refined sucrose, and seed oils, maybe also corn and soy, devoid of sufficient or balanced protein, minerals and vitamins to make good use of all the calories, and still craving more because the diet is deficient in some things they are needing?

Some backup here. David Kessler on The End of Overeating. Dr. Kessler writes about how the American food supply has been rigged to cause overeating by using a unique combination sugar, fat, and salt where your hunger signals are suppressed and your reward signals are exaggerated. Describes how processed food is more addictive than cocaine and uses brain scans to back up that assertion. My only disagreement with Dr. Kessler is his negative portrayal of sugar.

Dr. Peat talks about the perfect prescription for obesity which is PUFA + starch. Processed food is mainly PUFA + starch. Turn off the normal signal pathways, add PUFA + starch, and obesity is perfectly explained. Based on anecdotal evidence of one, it caused me to become obese and to overcome it, I finally got to a point where I was sick of being sick. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is the culprit here. People can almost immediately begin to heal themselves by weaning themselves from processed food and learning to prepare wholesome, healthy foods themselves.

 

[Runenight201]

Some backup here. David Kessler on The End of Overeating. Dr. Kessler writes about how the American food supply has been rigged to cause overeating by using a unique combination sugar, fat, and salt where your hunger signals are suppressed and your reward signals are exaggerated. Describes how processed food is more addictive than cocaine and uses brain scans to back up that assertion. My only disagreement with Dr. Kessler is his negative portrayal of sugar.

Dr. Peat talks about the perfect prescription for obesity which is PUFA + starch. Processed food is mainly PUFA + starch. Turn off the normal signal pathways, add PUFA + starch, and obesity is perfectly explained. Based on anecdotal evidence of one, it caused me to become obese and to overcome it, I finally got to a point where I was sick of being sick. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is the culprit here. People can almost immediately begin to heal themselves by weaning themselves from processed food and learning to prepare wholesome, healthy foods themselves.

Yes I believe the PUFA + starch + salt is a horribly addictive combination that significantly alters appetite regulation and causing overeating, and this may account for the gross cases of obesity we see (I think you can still be overweight without PUFA, but to become obese would be a feat)

I ate at chipotle again today after being good for the past 2 weeks. This time I avoided meat, and just went with starch veggies and cheese, thinking there’s no way I could feel bad from that. About halfway through the bowl, I noticed I was full, but it tasted so damn good that I couldn’t help but stuff myself with the rest of it, and I was hopelessly bloated and had a terrible time regulating my breath for the next couple hours. It also made me feel stupid and honestly I felt much more socially awkward. I think it also sent my desire for sugar into overdrive as I then proceeded to down lemonade, oj, coffee, and maple syrup insatiably until I was very overexcited and felt terrible. Infuriated at the state I had placed myself in, I beat the crap out of a punching bag for a solid 20 minutes and felt much better afterwards.

This SAD food is no joke, idk why I keep messing around with it, I always feel bad afterwards. If I had made my own rice and beans bowl, I would of easily stopped at that halfway mark with no problems. Perhaps the SAD diet is only for those with very high levels of self control, but I don’t like not eating to satiation every meal. Eating my own food, I can eat until I’m satisfied and feel very good.