It really is the āpull yourself up by the bootstrapsā or ājust donāt take any drugs, duhā of weight loss. Like, you canāt just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work. Itās reductive and unproductive.
People arenāt having trouble with math or willpower, theyāre having trouble with the fact that most (emphasis on āmostā) readily available, cheap food is bad for you. Most people in poverty grew up with processed, heavily advertised junk and have literal addictions to this shit.
Itās almost identical to saying ājust stop taking drugs.ā Or ājust stop drinking.ā
The reasons people turn to drugs and alcohol are not entirely different from the reasons people turn to food, but you have to keep eating something, and changing your diet from a very unhealthy one to a healthy one is a lot of work. You can keep going to the drive through, but a, theyāre literally designed to get you to buy more than you want, and b, would you tell an alcoholic to go in to a liquor store for soda on day 1 of recovery?
Itās also misleading as hell, because calorie absorption and basal metabolic rates differ so widely among people. My husband and I live similarly active lifestyles and eat about the same amount of food. Iām slightly taller than he is, but half his weight. I donāt know how that happens, but it does.
Not really, evidence suggests that between average people you will see at most 4% difference in BMR
If itās not a big difference, how does it lead to such divergent results? Iād suggest that a 4% difference is in fact pretty big, as thatās the equivalent of over 500 calories a week.
Do you have a link for the evidence? Iād be interested to see what it says about calorie absorption, as I suspect that has an even greater effect. Unfortunately, everyone just seems to repeat CICO as though itās easy or simple to measure either of those inputs with accuracy. People just hope theyāre average and that it will work normally for them. Most people are average, so that works for a lot of people, but not everyone.
I personally donāt digest animal fat well, so anything other than white meat chicken will give me the shits. I donāt eat animal products anymore, but when I did, I obviously wasnāt receiving 200 calories from 200 calories worth of beef. My sister has celiacās, and when she realized it and stopped eating gluten, she gained a bunch of weight, because she was finally absorbing calories from her diet.
just ignore all the social, systemic issues in our health and food industries, reduce it all to cals in vs cals out, and expect that to work
Thatās literally exactly how it has worked for me. Obviously it takes some will power and discipline, but so does basically everything.
Our individual stories do not always translate to the bigger picture, gmtom. You might have grown up in a household where you were insulated from the predations of the processed food industry. You might have had better habits instilled in you as a child. You might have had a positive body image at one point in your life, to serve as inspiration for your weight loss journey. Maybe none of those are true and you truly are one of the lucky (and hard working!) ones who escaped this situation just like the addicts who recover through willpower alone. Regardless, we cannot all rely on being gmtom.
My final paragraph is not focused on the individual but on the epidemic of obesity. We cannot solve this through brow beating about CICO just like Republicans arenāt going to solve the drug addiction crisis through jailing everyone with an addiction. People are using food to fill a hole in their lives, just like drugs, and we have to do the hard work of figuring that root out. Otherwise, we are doomed to become ineffective and unhelpful, leaving people to suffer.
