I want to lose weight the traditional way, by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, but this new way might be cheaper if you figure lost wages.

I have mixed feelings about this. Yes eating disorders are bad, yes pressure to achieve literally unhealthy goals is bad, yes fat acceptance is good because no one should be unpleasant or abusive to anyone because of how they look, yes medical interventions for weight loss have a scary record side-effects-wise and these new drugs haven't been around long enough that it's clear they won't be the same.

But, most people, if they could wave a wand and pick their body-type, would be reasonably lean. I've been mildly overweight and now I'm not (getting divorced from a man who needed to be surrounded by snacks to feel secure but didn't eat them himself made a big difference, but there's also been some intentional dieting involved), and I strongly prefer the way I feel when I'm not. This isn't just social pressure which I never had much of, I wasn't ever heavy enough to be stigmatized and I'm not really the type to present myself as superhott regardless of my current weight (either personality-wise or how well I could carry it off), it's how my body feels going for long runs, or up stairs, and so on.

So, if these new drugs turn out not to be a significant health risk, is there much of a downside for people being able to move closer to the weights they prefer being? I don't really see one.

I've tried commuting even more, but it's not helping.

To put it another way, a large part of what's so oppressive about pressure to not be fat is that it has been very difficult for some people to achieve. Pressuring fat people has meant pressuring them to do something inbetween incredibly difficult and actually impossible. So the pressure isn't a good thing.

But there are pretty decent reasons to not be fat if you are able to make that choice. If these drugs make the choice easier, why would that be bad?

I can't call it "social pressure" exactly, because truly no one gives a shit what this frumpy middle-aged lady looks like, but for me, it's definitely "internalized social pressure". Athletically, I feel great! I feel fit and able to go out and run, and do my crossfit workouts, etc. If I weren't allowed to look in a mirror or look at photos of myself, I'd have a mental image of myself 20-30 lbs ago.

My doctor did mention this to me last fall, without a strong recommendation either way. I'm seeing him next week, so I'll see what he says. I think I'm not technically obese at the moment, though I may have been last year.

I guess here's some reasons it could be bad, supposing it's a truly miracle drug with so significant side effects:
- will the achievability of thinness make life worse for those who are still overweight?
- how closely will the availability of drugs correspond to SES?

Oh, funny. I really feel the difference. I'm a lot springier and fitter feeling than I was in my early forties, and I was ten years younger then, but I'm a bunch lighter now. I was exercising a fair amount then, that was when I was bike-commuting, but I didn't feel as good physically then as I do now.

7.1: Maybe? But it seems unlikely, life is pretty hard for them now already?
7.2: This, yeah. At least for the seventeen years until generics, this is going to need having insurance, and probably having not just insurance but decent insurance.

7: Will this crowd out availability for people who actually have Type 2 diabetes (or otherwise need to reduce their blood glucose levels)?

Obviously, until production ramps up to meet demand, it is shitty that diabetic patients aren't being prioritized over people using the drugs for medically unimportant weight loss.

That crossed with 10 -- I meant to raise the same issue.

Mounjaro is not yet approved for obesity, but it had reported great weight loss benefits, so people are already harassing their doctors about it. If their doctors work for a big health system they can't prescribe for it for that reason.

For me an extra 10 pounds of fat goes into my chest which is already large, so I find exercising uncomfortable.

Tim has an issue where his GI track empties slightly faster than normal (not true dumping) which then causes his body to produce a lot insulin to lower his blood glucose. He then experiences side effects from feeling hypoglycemic, and everything is converted to fat, and then he gets joint pain. If one of these drugs could help ameliorate any of those issues, I would be thrilled.

7.2, 9.2: I thought even good insurance only covers it if you have diabetes.

not true dumping

He can't poop?

10 and 11: Temporarily, yes. But that's because one of the drug manufacturers had some problems with GMP that's resolved but affected supply. The drug has different names when it's prescribed for weight loss, but docs were prescribing under the diabetes drug name and cutting into the supply for diabetics.

Generic - semaglutide
Diabetes - ozempic
Obesity - wegovy

Also, unless your obese insurance is unlikely to cover this. Anyone who is just overweight would be paying out of pocket.

I guess I could be obese again without too much effort.

If it's important for weight loss, I can gain weight.

I spent about exactly four years in what doctors call a healthy weight range, longer than most people who did my medical weight management program, but then I went back up with the pandemic - possibly the best excuse.

I did manage to arrest my growth well below my previous peak, about 270; my labs are still good (although I went back onto a single hypertension med, which is working), and I'm still exercising substantially, but I'd definitely prefer to be lighter, esp. for dating reasons. I kind of dread listening to Michael Hobbes's podcast on this topic as it might offer better evidence these efforts are misguided.

I've been thinking I would be pretty happy if I could get to halfway between my old norm and my current one, which would be about 220-230. That might be a more sustainable target - plus objectively healthier than 25 BMI. But I realize as I write it out that it's like I'm negotiating with my weight as an entity.

I asked my doctor about Ozempic and he was a bit skeptical - and in particular reminded me that drug companies love stealthily promoting off-label uses like this for financial gain. I do wonder if all this media buzz is just another example whose evidence will fall apart like so many other off-label uses have.

15: dumping syndrome is something that happens to some people who have had bariatric surgery, but the endocrinologist thinks it's related to the diverticulitis surgery he had as a baby. They are trying a super old-school diabetes drug, acarbose.

Semaglutide isn't generic, but I don't know what the right word is to use for what I mean.

20.2: I've found that I need intense cardio a couple of times a week to keep my blood pressure in line on my current medication.

21.1: That's a relief.

6: I know this is weird but in the first couple years I read the blog I developed a clear image of you as tallish, thin, wry, and despite clear information to the contrary since then your appearance is kind of frozen in my mind as a middle-aged E.O. Wilson.

I got my physique from generations of peasant farmers.

Learning/working in disability studies has affected my outlook on this more than anything else. The interconnected history of ableism, racism, and homophobia is pretty fascinating. But also having sick & disabled friends (and, I mean, also being etc.) and a very fat partner made me start thinking about bodies and health in really different ways.

The "health at any size" thing is okay, but unhealthy people are ALSO okay. My favorite slogan related to all this is "All bodies are good bodies".

Health isn't a moral good any more than thinness (or whiteness or straightness or maleness).

(I'm going to Cincinnati in a couple of weeks to be on a panel about Crip Theory and disability in the arts so I've been thinking & reading about this a lot)

E. Messily refuses to listen to all podcasts on this topic, no matter how loudly you scream at her.

I was raised to have a bad attitude about authority. Don't tell ME what to listen to! I won't listen to ANYTHING

One of the things I've reassured myself with over the years is, imagine if every unhealthy thing someone did showed up in them visibly - gambling, relationships, what have you. Weight is a social focus mostly via availability bias.

28: About time you lived up to your middle handle.

Drinking shows up in your face, but you have to drink way more than I could.

20: I gained all MY weight before the pandemic and my excuse was CANCER so if we needed excuses I would definitely win.

30 has baffled me. Can you explain it on Standpipe's podcast please?

33: The second of three words of your full, rhyming handle.

Now I'm lost too. Is there a three-word version of Messily's handle?

"Especially Messily ____"?

32: I also gained (most of) my weight before the pandemic, but I have no excuse at all except that it must have been some sort of genetic trigger. I came out of the winter of '18-'19 with maybe a little more belly than previous winters, but unlike previous springs, it simply never went away. It's been baffling/frustrating*, but hasn't driven me to change anything.

*a mixture of vanity, annoyance at the significant amount of clothing investment that no longer fits/looks good, and the objective increase in difficulty biking up big hills.

You can get an electric bike. The sign in the store says it's not cheating.

On H-G's second block quote, my thought is that the rest of us are in denial that rich people--who are, almost definitionally, the ones who are taking this expensive medicine off-label to go from slender to skinny--never bought into any of our "celebrate all bodies" stuff. Any time you see pictures from some event full of rich people (not celebrities, but Succession/Billions types), everybody is thin as hell, with occasional exceptions for over-60 men.

So maybe what this stuff is doing in practice is making that kind of skinniness accessible to slightly-less-rich people. Like, I'm not sure exactly what the billionaires do to stay thin*, but they could do it without semaglutide. Now the mere decamillionaires can afford it through semglutide.

*I think some part of it, aside from much more intense social scrutiny, is that being that rich almost inherently means being wired differently, and that enables a fanatical devotion to skinniness, whether it's eating like a bird, working out absurd amounts**, or whatever other interventions are involved. Not greater willpower per se, but a mindset that values achieving a certain body type above the pleasure of just fucking eating some chips.

**exercise doesn't drop weight without caloric restriction, but maintaining that kind of body past 30 tends to require it.

I think a lot of the truly rich (including all athletes, and most actors) have chefs and nutritionists who are deciding most of what they eat.

I think I prefer "body neutrality" as a frame, because I think body ought not to carry any moral valence. I don't have to feel positive about my ACL injury and the likely chronic problems I'm going to have. But I also don't have to think it matters to self-worth, etc.

I always feel like it goes underremarked that even with the benefits of wealth/privilege/etc, being lean for most people requires conscious commitment similar to taking up a hobby. That's fine if you like sports or working out as a hobby, but if you don't, it's rather like if being healthy was equivalent to playing the bassoon.

Yeah, I think there's a (quite high) economic level where it gets practical to sort of outsource managing your daily food intake so that you don't have to thinking about how much or what you're eating at all.

Now the mere decamillionaires can afford it through semglutide.

It looks like it's $600 to $1,000 a month. That's not cheap, but hardly out of range for many working professionals without millions.

I worry about my fitness because:

People around here have told me about a "runner's high" or something like that, feeling good during or after exercise. I've never noticed something like that. Pride at an achievement or diligence or whatever but nothing remotely like an altered state of mind. I have noticed the reverse, though. Sometimes I've gone several days in a row without any physical activity worth mentioning, just sitting at a desk/table for work and on a couch for recreation and in a car for errands, and I'm noticeably depressed after that. I call it a "sloth's slump".

I have at times felt a runners high, but it's really not as good a being just buzzed without being unpleasantly drunk.

Running over the West End bridge in the 1/2 marathon was a great feeling, the combination of running at peak power (before I'd been going long enough to make it a slog) and the view and being part of a crowd.

42 to 40.

To 41 -- with the caveat that while health isn't a moral good, it is for most people a pretty big hedonic good, in a way that playing the bassoon is only for the unusually committed bassoon player. A healthy body, for most people, means more physical pleasure and less pain, and that's a significant driver of choices.

This is easy to overstate when we're talking about fatness, given that "bodies that are socially perceived as
fat" are really not identical with "bodies that are unhealthy to the point that there is some detrimental effect on the daily experiences of the person." But there's some connection there.

I've been running a lot for the last few years, but no runner's high. I do get what you could call runner's withdrawal, though -- I get fidgety and antsy without enough exercise. A decent walk is enough, but I need something.

I usually think bassoonists are murderers.

So I'm living up to "messily"? Friend, I have never not lived up to messily. I bask in glorious disorder and even the parts of my life that are strictly organized look disasterously chaotic from the outside.

I'm 100% in favor of pursuing any & every hedonic good, as long as people don't mix that up with being morally (or otherwise) superior to those who have different sorts of bodies and/or minds.

Maybe if I could feel morally superior about not having chronic hip pain, I would remember to do the stretches that prevent it? Because not having hip pain doesn't seem to be enough motivation.

The pain takes weeks to go away, but moral superiority might provide rapid positive feedback.

47: Health is great. I'm doing as well as I am now because 25 years of consistently paying attention to health/strength. But the condition for health being "commit to having a serious fitness routine in your forties" instead of "it just naturally happens because I walk five miles a day in my walkable city and eat foods that I like which all happen to be comparatively unprocessed such that I can control my weight by snacking less on treats" is the challenge. Health is good, but the time and effort commitment to be fit in an environment that doesn't support is basically a bassoon-level commitment. My sister (job, car commute, three kids, short so while in theory calorie restriction can work really needs exercise) is trying to lose weight and the hardest part is adding an extra hour to her day.

51: Yeah, and people are terrible about that -- both really bad at evaluating what choices are meaningfully available to other people and unpleasantly prone to judging people who they think are making choices they wouldn't make themselves.

I don't get a runner's high, but I do get something more akin to satisfaction at a job well done. I'd have more doubt about what I'm experiencing relative to what others describe, but AB gets such an obvious runner's high that it's super clear that I don't. Practically any run she does, no matter how modest*, leaves her absolutely beaming.

*like, a mile, half of it walked, is pretty much enough.

Ok, I have a question and I swear I'm not trolling. I like the framing of body neutrality and hedonic value, not to be mixed up with moral value.

So how does smoking fit into this? or helmet laws? When we were talking about gambling and moralistic nudges, it seemed clear to me that helmet laws are right and good and laws that make it more expensive to smoke are also good. How do I square that with the current conversation? Is there negative moral value to smoking or not wearing a helmet on your motorcycle, because of the cost incurred to others? Or are they morally neutral and helmet laws are still okay, in order to offset the cost to other? I'm losing track of what I'm saying.

This stuff is a weekly injection and typically results in about a 16% weight loss (e.g., 220 -> 185). That is why the article specifically called out as beneficiaries women who were thin, and who now can easily be "fashion thin".

Also, you have to do it for the rest of your life or the weight comes back. Awesome drug from the company's perspective!

Also, the vast majority of patient in a randomized trial reported adverse gastrointestinal effects. Nausea, constipation, and vomiting appear to be elevated versus the control group.

The first link was really fascinating; thank you for sharing it. The way Ford described the switch to a new hobby because the lifelong weight-loss "hobby" had become superfluous was kind of mesmerizing. Alice Gregory, in a review of some books on anorexia, wrote about the great difficulty of de-romanticizing anorexia, and did her best to express how incredibly boring it was to spend hours counting calories, meticulously eating terrible food, and having to do her homework in a sauna because she couldn't regulate her body temperature. ("However shall I stay warm??" is highly romantic, but "however shall I keep these problem set pages from wrinkling while I try to fucking write on them?" is not.)

Health isn't a moral good

I've been thinking about this for decades, along with the proposition "health isn't a social good." My thoughts aren't comment-worthy yet, however; I might be a world-record-setting slow-ass thinker.

57: I'm not sure I can answer this concisely without a lot of hemming and hawing over well-worn territory, but I will note that some people now are trying to make the next frontier in anti-tobacco activism banning retail sale entirely, and that is where they lose me. Fucking prohibitionists!

(Also banning smoking inside private homes in multifamily housing; that started a couple decades ago, but appears to be gaining ground, up to 70+ cities nationwide. Somehow not struck down as discriminatory.)

I've never felt what's described as a runner's high, but I've normally been pretty motivated to jog regardless; it's just something I do, over and over, outside or on a treadmill.

The one time I felt something close was recently when I was doing strength training for the first time maybe ever, and I somehow felt a high or buzz in my arms.

I always feel like it goes underremarked that even with the benefits of wealth/privilege/etc, being lean for most people requires conscious commitment similar to taking up a hobby.

I keep returning to this comment in my head. But I don't have anything to add to it.

57: I think smoking regulations and helmet laws or seatbelt laws are straight-up paternalism: the government believes its citizens will be better off if they're prevented from making certain choices. And that's something that I'm suspicious of in the abstract, but if I'm convinced enough that the case for the law is right, I'm fine with it.

It's not exactly that it's immoral to die in a survivable car crash because you think seatbelts are uncool, but it's a dumbass enough decision that I think it's fine for the government to restrict your freedom by giving you a ticket for driving without your seatbelt on.

60: It's remarkable (but seldom remarked-upon) how much the politics of tobacco restriction changed once smoking became associated with poor people.

Anyway, yeah, I think stuff like smoking and seatbelt laws falls into the general paternalism of public health laws in general, with justification on the basis of personal health bolstered by the impacts on the health of others to extent that applies.

In case anyone hasn't seen it, this is on topic.

I think it would be similarly justifiable on paternalistic-but-scientific grounds for the government, on health grounds, to realign which food types it subsidizes.

God, 66 is so great. I miss Ortberg. (I'm sure he's still writing but he's not on my radar anymore. Or is it the Dear Prudie gig?)

Bringing that back around to the topic of the thread, I don't think there's anything plausible the state could do, regulating people's individual behavior-wise around food, that would improve public health as much as smoking regulations or seatbelt laws do, or even perceptibly at all. Anything effective would have to be insanely draconian -- like, British wartime food rationing apparently produced a generation of children notably better nourished than kids before it started or after it ended, but no one's talking about doing anything like that because it would be so, so out of the realm of political possibility (and I agree that it should be.)

I dunno, I bet fixing poverty would get us most of the way back to 1950s waistlines with no other intervention needed.

Oh whoops, you did say "regulating people's individual behavior."

68: I think his name's Lavery these days -- he took his wife's name after a horrifying bust-up with his birth family.

Then yes. Workplace wellness problems hopefully demonstrate exactly how terrible it would be if the government tried to get involved.

@63

While it would be nice to believe that support for a particular instance of government paternalism derived from some measured assessment of costs averted versus liberties infringed, I suspect that "Ha Ha, fuck you outgroup" is more often the basis.

For what it's worth, the CDC estimates that obesity costs the US healthcare system $147 billion a year. In comparison, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that failure to wear a seatbelt costs about 11 billion a year.

68: He's still around but doesn't have a high profile perch anymore. He got married and his name is now Danny Lavery.

67: Oh, yeah, shaping subsidies and school lunches and all that with an eye to public health would be a good thing, I just doubt it would have that much of an effect.

It would certainly be better if food policy were oriented more toward health outcomes than the economic interests of farmers. Not that it's very likely.

74 isn't the right comparison since it's the cost of failing to wear seat belts after a largely successful effort to get them worn.

I've been relatively lucky in adulthood - varying within a range that's rarely perceived as overweight enough for comment-- and being a guy with the lower social pressures around weight makes it easy to spend little time and focus on it. (I suppose a different way of saying it is that when people talk about a kind of exercise as a health benefit, I think about the promised improvement as mostly health, rather than "improved" appearance, weight loss, etc.)

My wife's body image was really damaged by a controlling mother and mom's exposure to 1980s diet culture -- her mom was fanatical about her own appearance as the critical component of her personality, so projected and tried to shape her daughter from way too young to fit the ideal... and instead screwed up my wife's body's reaction to things like calorie restriction. I suspect that she's far more prone to weight rebound, since her body was trained from childhood to put up with periods of starvation.

Of course, we both were discouraged by high school culture from most forms of exercise-- I know that I bought into way too many nerd/jock stereotypes. The PE and later gym culture of bullying and putdowns kept us both away from exercise as a habit; it wasn't until our 30s and improved self-confidence from being together that we began incorporating more exercise into our leisure activities. Much like LB and Cyrus above, her mood really improves when she bike commutes to work, and several days in a row when she can't exercise has her craving her "endorphin hit".

I fell about a month ago on the ice. Two times, and the second time it wasn't just on my butt. I didn't break anything, but I still feel niggling thigh pain. I thought it was better, but then I went on a long walk, and it started bothering me again.

I is harder to eat well and feel well if I don't do my 50-minute walk with 18 minutes of 30-20-10 interval walking. This is a pretty minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but it's bothering me enough that I'm going to see a physical therapist next week. And if I gain 10 pounds, my clothes won't fit very well, and I will feel uncomfortable.

57: smoking, being overweight, not wearing helmets when biking: secondhand smoke is a cost to others, i.e. measurable harm, but other than that they're all morally neutral. The financial cost to others of any of them via insurance or taxes or whatever is irrelevant compared to the injustice built into America's health care system.

Not wearing helmets is unlike the other two in that it's pure stupidity.

Yeah, 74.2 is completely off base. The question is what would costs be if 5% of the population wore seatbelts, which is where the number might be in the absence of seatbelt laws.

I also think 70 is silly. There's no US demographic that isn't considerably fatter than they were 75 years ago. I understand how poverty intersects with obesity, but food abundance correlates 1:1 with population-wide weight gains. Just like cultures that don't eat much meat when the population is poor suddenly start eating more meat when the population gets richer (remember when people used to say that "real" Chinese food wasn't as meaty as Chinese-American, and the reason was supposedly superior Chinese virtue? And now Chinese people are far wealthier, and they eat much, much more meat than they did).

25 years ago, widespread obesity was commonly linked to run-down places--not just poor neighborhoods, but entire regions like the Rust Belt. Wealthy places full of exercisers, like CA and CO, were supposedly immune. Today, not a single state in the country still falls within what was considered the normal weight distribution pre-1970.

81: I'm moderating on helmets somewhat. I still think people are safer with them, and I will keep wearing them, but the bike utopias of the world have gotten there without helmet laws or norms; there, biking is just excruciatingly normal, and not having to strap on safety equipment seems to be part of that. Getting safe bike routes has a lot more potential to reduce death and injury than helmet laws, although the latter might do something on the margin. It's also possible there may be some self-fulfilling prophecy, where helmet-wearing makes drivers more careless around you. (I haven't reviewed the research recently.)

49: Good bassoonists get the brooms to take care of that. Or are the brooms for clean-up after the murdery bits are done? I don't know for sure; I was a violist.

Not wearing helmets is unlike the other two in that it's pure stupidity.

I don't see the argument that smoking is more intelligent than biking without a helmet. Especially since, in the most bike-heavy places on earth, nobody wears one.

You can't really wear a cigarette.

81 and 83: which helmets are you guys talking about, just bicycles? When I think about helmet laws, I'm thinking about motorcycles. In NH it is legal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet. That's the one I strongly supeport, I.e. I think MA is safer for requiring helmets. People in motorcycle accidents who aren't wearing helmets clog up emergency departments. And we aren't willing to allow people to agree not to be treated if they're in an accident without one.

I was talking about bicycles, yes.

83: Eh, I didn't think about how the discussion had moved on from general personal/social/moral judgements to legal policy preferences. I'd be less opinionated about bicycle helmet laws.

85: Starting smoking is dumb in the moment, but when I learn that someone is a habitual smoker, I don't know how addicted they are, and addiction is a disease and I'd hesitate to make judgements about people for stuff like that. "I really like the feel of the breeze on/in my skull" is not in the DSM, though.

It's also possible there may be some self-fulfilling prophecy, where helmet-wearing makes drivers more careless around you. (I haven't reviewed the research recently.)

Yeah, I've never seen evidence that was strong enough to push anyone off their priors: it's always small effects, and people insist they're actually large effects because they intuitively believe the just-so story that would lead to such effects ("drivers are inherently hostile to people wearing Lycra" is a serious claim I've seen made).

I'm fine with under-12 helmet laws for obvious reasons, but absolutely reject them for adults*, and I'd prefer a norm where going helmetless was unmarked. In my personal use, I skip them if I'm doing a flat ride but wear them on long and/or hilly ones. My feeling is that, if a car hits me with any force, the helmet won't do much good**, so I'm mostly wearing it in case my tire blows out or I hit a wet patch while I'm riding down a hill at 20+ mph--in that condition, a head impact would be absorbed by the helmet, plus the helmet protects your face against abrasion. My friend who rides hundreds of miles a week never wears one, which I think is a little nuts, but to each their own.

*I feel differently about motorcycle helmets, both because motorcycling is inherently more dangerous and because motorcycle helmets are far more effective at protection

**obviously a little good is better than none, but it's very marginal to the kinds of impacts we're talking about

@82

Nope. Sorry. Right now, about 10% of the population does not wear seatbelts. New Hampshire does not require adults to wear seatbelts (Live Free or Die!). But 75% of people in New Hampshire still wear them. Presumably, if you removed seatbelt laws, then about 75% of the population would still wear seatbelts. So if 11 billion is the cost of 10% non-compliance, about 30 billion is the cost of 25% non-compliance. Much much less than the 147 billion cost of obesity.

In fact, even if compliance fell to 5%, the increased costs would still be about 100 billion dollars, far less than the cost of obesity.

Now - I'm not arguing against seatbelt laws (or helmet laws). I support them. I'm just pointing out that attempts to distinguish seatbelt usage and helmet usage from obesity on the basis of societal costs are farcical.

91: I cannot imagine NH would have this level of use in the absence of the culture change which started with the activism campaigns that included mandatory seatbelt laws in 49 states (for front passengers).

My friend who rides hundreds of miles a week

What did they have to do to get a Time Turner from Hermione?

There's no US demographic that isn't considerably fatter than they were 75 years ago.

Wealthy people? I am skeptical that this is true.

I know plenty of rich, fat people.

Some of them really hate motorcycle helmet laws.

It's the demographic that buys Harley Davidson.

@92

And I cannot imagine that mandatory seatbelt laws would have passed without the increased seatbelt usage that resulted from stigmatizing the failure to wear a seatbelt ... wait, we were talking about obesity, right?

Anyway, even if we returned to 5% compliance (which it really, really doubtful), the cost of obesity would still exceed the cost of seat belt non-compliance.

So all this stuff about activists and culture change is besides the point: seatbelt usage cannot be distinguished from obesity on the basis of societal costs.

I think the easy distinction there is that the governmental intervention for seat belts is obvious, not terribly intrusive, and effective. Any governmental intervention related to obesity would be extreme, intrusive, and only dubiously likely to have any meaningful effect at all. But I'm not 100% what conclusion you're arguing toward -- the government should be doing more about obesity or less about seatbelts or what?

I'm mildly interested in this subject but I have to say, I never want to argue with "nope" about anything at all for any reason, ever, and it seems unavoidable here, so I'm out. I hope you get whatever this cost/benefit issue is sorted out to your satisfaction.

I think 98.1 is wrong. Seat belt laws were very much against the popular will when passed. They passed because of the undemocratic parts of American government. States had to pass them to get federal highway dollars. Still, Nebraska voters overturned the law by initiative. Then the state legislature put in back because they needed the money. Then voters tried to overturn it again. Nobody I knew wore seat belts before the law. It took a long time for the law to sink in, and only after did norms change. I didn't start wearing one around my peers until 1989, after I cracked a windshield with my head.

98: Your argument is based on taking the CDC estimate on the cost of obesity seriously. That's silly.

The 80s were a remarkably stupid time.

@99

Once we have accepted your distinction, we don't get to wall off obesity as definitionally unsuitable for government intervention. Instead, the question becomes whether a particular intervention would be obvious, not terribly intrusive, and effective. Furthermore, there is no obvious reason to talk about obesity differently than how we talk about seatbelt non-compliance or helmet non-compliance (or alcoholism, or other self-destructive conditions with societal consequences). There is certainly no reason to say "[o]urs was supposed to be the feel-good era of Lizzo and Ashley Graham and Adele" when Lizzo, 5' 10" and 308 pounds, has a all-cause mortality rate twice that of someone with a BMI of 25.

Seat belts were weird, many cars didn't even have the shoulder belt, Reebok hightops were normal, kids could buy tobacco regardless of the law, drunk driving was barely thought ill of, jeans with buttons instead of zippers.

So much Hamm's.

Lizzo is an individual person, she hasn't got an all-cause mortality rate. I assume you're talking about women her age with her BMI or something?

And sure, there's not a principled bright-line distinction between public health interventions related to smoking and related to obesity, it's all about the particular facts of any specific intervention. But the particular facts do seem to me to very clearly indicate that there's not much effective for government to do here. Anything in the realm of exhorting fat people to do what it takes to be less fat is pointless and cruel; societal pressure has been exhorting about as hard as possible for ages and it doesn't do much.

If there were a magic bullet -- something like it's all HFCS, and if we just banned that then people would all weigh what they did in 1940 -- I could easily be persuaded that it was worth higher food costs or whatever. But I don't think there's any policy intervention like that available. Do you think there's something that's been neglected, that you want to tell us about?

I still wear jeans with buttons instead of zippers, out of habit formed in the 1980s.

I don't even own jeans. I switched to khakis in the 90s and was won over.

Wealthy people? I am skeptical that this is true.

I know plenty of rich, fat people.

Figure 1 is obesity prevalence by income and gender from 1999 to 2014 - they do all seem to be rising, the highest-income group perhaps by a bit less than the others but not obviously so.

I tend to think about effective interventions for health/movement lie more in making movement automatic. I have to drive my kids to school because of traffic patterns, but if the roads were different (or the school closer), we'd bike. 4 miles a day won't turn you into an athlete, but over time the extra movement adds up.

Oh, yeah. My advocacy for dense urbanism is overdetermined; I like living in NY and there are very few other places like it available for me to move to, and reducing vehicle miles traveled is a necessary step in opposing climate change, and all that; it'd improve people's lives by making it possible for them to live near jobs, and so on. But it would also probably be a significant public health win on the "making daily activity easier" front even if it had no effect at all on people's body-fat-levels.

That just seems out of reach considered as a public health intervention. There are so many reasons for it and public health isn't the biggest one, and yet it's still hard to make happen.

@107

obesity is socially contagious That is a good reason not to normalize obesity.

Why aren't we treating obesity like smoking? Put a tax on calories (not "bad foods" - just calories). Pay out the accumulated tax revenue at the end of the year, per capita (or stratify the accumulated pool by the demographics of your choice and pay out per capita to members of that demographic). So if you eat more than the average person of your sex, age, etc. then you are a net payor, otherwise you are a net payee. Crank that tax up! There exists a level at which obesity goes away (likely at the level necessary to return household food expenditures to proportion of total consumption they amounted to in the 1970s, when we consumed about 77% of the calories we consumed in the 1990s).

Or just have the government pay for wegovy for anyone with a BMI over 40, if that is more effective and costs less...

Everyone was smoking in the 1970s.

Basically, the problem is that we eat way too fucking much. Exercise has almost nothing to do with it. The kind of food we eat has almost nothing to do with it. We just eat too many calories.

Well, you've come up with something as intrusive and politically implausible as wartime food rationing, so that's impressive. It's so far out of the realm of anything that could possibly happen that it doesn't seem worth nitpicking.

"Please, sir, may I have some more?"

More plausible would be a tax on calories only in beverages. That's a smaller intervention, and my understanding is beverages account for a pretty significant portion of the increase in average calories. But given how hard it is to raise taxes on alcohol, where the payoffs are huge and immediate, even that's not very plausible.

118: About that. (The deal has held since then)

119 was supposed to have this link.

@118 Beverage tax is good! Great step in the right direction. Just make it calorie-based, rather than "good food/bad food" based. Orange juice is just as bad for you as Fanta, and the whole point of whole milk is fattening mammals.

101 to 116

Everyone was smoking in the 1970s.

For real, I'd bet that the large scale smoking cessation of the past 50 years shifted the median waistline by 5 lbs.

Don't unpack that sentence. I don't know why median would make sense there. The median probably didn't quit smoking in the past 50 years.

Smoking cessation and the aging of the population matter, but don't explain it all.

@120 My belief is that the fundamental reason we don't emphasize caloric restriction as the solution to America's obesity epidemic is because it would be terrible for business.

As a nation, we could probably eat 1/2 as much as we do. That is about 800 billion in lost revenue for the food industry.

The median smoker quit smoking in the past 50 years.

How on earth would one tax someone for excess calories? Logistically I can't figure this out.

Kids used to get snacks in the afternoon, but other people only ate during meals. The idea that it was bad to be temporarily hungry and that snacking between meals was ok is my theory.

I don't think it's that impossible, it's like a VAT but a calorie added tax instead. (I mean, small restaurants would cheat, but they cheat on sales tax too.)

@128 - And that is the kind of change that drives the obesity epidemic. And confronting it pits you against an entire industry that will cease to exist if you prevail.

@129 - yup, like that.

I wonder if there's any hope of better treatments for diabetes on the horizon. People talk about "health" like it's a monolithic thing, but in terms of obesity and public healthy it's basically all about diabetes.

129: I am having a hard time. I go to the grocery store. Everything has a VAT? OK, but... aren't buying for several people at different stages of development/caloric needs? How does one figure out what my budget *should* be?

It's not on "excess" calories, it's just a tax on all calories. (With say an offsetting decrease in payroll tax so it's not regressive.)

Similarly we just have a tax on gas and a tax on alcohol, not a tax on alcohol beyond one drink per day.

Jeez Cala, you're just not imagining hard enough. Each person enters the grocery store. They approach the computer portal, and enter their height, weight, and age, and typical activity level, verified by their mandatory ankle monitor. That way you can distinguish the quiet 80 year old grandma who only eats 1300 calories a day in a way that's comeasurate with the 25 year old day laborer who eats 4000 calories away. But then next you need to determine how often they go to the grocery store, so that they can't lie about "stockpiling" food. Then finally, you tax them on the excess calories they're purchasing above what they truly need to be healthy. Do I have to make everything explicit around here?

134: But how does that disincentivize the grandmother from eating 1500 calories when she only needs 1400??? She's going to get a free ride, that pudgy degenerate!

This topic reminded me of mathbabe's blog, who got bariatric surgery (and blogged a bunch about it) despite being happy with body, because of a family history of Type II diabetes. Has anyone read her newer book, "The Shame Machine"?

136: well, she won't buy the fatty almonds and avocaods, but the EZ POP SNAXPAX XTREME will come in just under wherever the tax kicks in.

Sugar production is subsidized in the US (FL!). Maybe also restrict any company that buys or produces high-fructose corn syrup from using passwords longer than 9 characters?

138 reminds me to tell the millennials, "Good job with the avocado toast." That's stuff is great.

140: Counterpoint: sandwiches should have tops! This isn't Denmark!

Talking to one of our docs about public health messaging and she stopped and looked despairing and said "what would really help is if you could just get everyone in this entire region to lose about ten kilos" and then went on to talk about diabetes and bariatric ambulances and knee degeneration and necrosis and stroke risk and cancer risk and so on.

You know what group of people never seem to be obese, regardless of age or income? Doctors. Some of ours are a bit overweight, I'm sure, but of the 30% of our population who are obese, zero of them apparently are doctors, and it isn't because they smoke any more.

Our economy depend on people spending money on excess food, then spending money on dieting products, and then spending money on stuff to distract from hunger, and then spending money for consolation after regaining the weight and then all the money spent on clothes that fit pre, post and post-post diet. Messing with any aspect of this could cause economic collapse!

It's not a sandwich. It's a spread on toast. That's the millennial genius. An avocado sandwich wouldn't be good.

@136 The problem isn't the person eating 1500 calories rather than 1400. It's the person eating 4000 calories rather than 1700.

Make the tax $0.005 per calorie. Grandma's out 50 cents.

That is going to be kind of a mess of correlations with income, wealth, leisure time, and so forth. Unless she does knees and then I totally believe it. Knees take so much stress and there's no way around the effects of weight on impact.

...and it isn't because they smoke any more.

My doctor as a kid would always have a pipe in his mouth. Fortunately, never lit when he was seeing patients.

137: I consider myself forward-thinking but I draw the line at blogs getting bariatric surgery.

A calorie tax wouldn't be particularly difficult to administer. Politically impossible to put in place, of course.

@143

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature!

The thing with alcohol and cigarettes is that the taxes are crazy high, and no one needs to have cigarettes daily to live. With both alcohol & cigarettes IIRC the people who indulge a lot are nearly unmovable by cost, and there's some evidence of that with e.g. things like fast food.

What kind of taxes would get people to cut their caloric intake by 17%, and is especially high enough to deter those who are consuming 4000 when they need to be consuming 1500, that isn't wildly regressive? Keep in mind that France also has an "obesity epidemic" and spending on food is a higher proportion of household income by a factor of 2, IIRC.

OT: My son is sitting in Fran Lebowitz's chair.

We could also raise income tax on overweight and obese people to 90%. Go after their assets to pay the back taxes if they don't lose weight fast enough.

Two words: meth amphetamine.

Three words: bunches of methamphetamine.

@151

The taxes will be rebated (monthly, bi-weekly?) on a per capita basis (or an age, sex, and height-adjusted basis) into the Postal Bank Accounts maintained for every US resident with an social security number!

So A) not regressive, and B) you are never getting hit for the entire tax for very long. In the long run, you are just paying (or earning) the difference between you and the average consumer.

Two words: the beatings will continue until morale improves.

This idea is so abjectly horrible it's almost making me rethink the wisdom of carbon-tax-and-rebate which follows similar logic.

I think I've mentioned before that I used to drink a lot of sweetened sodas, mainly Coke and Pepsi, and then I decided to stop. Without expecting it, I dropped about 30 pounds within a year. I didn't own a scale at the start of the process, so I'm not sure the exact amount. Definitely from over 200 (probably no more than 210) to around 180.

I did feel less healthy at my highest weight but I hadn't started trying to lose weight* before I started losing it. I was actually trying to reduce caffeine after adding regular coffee drinking to soda drinking. So I got pretty worried about the unexplained weight loss.

Then I bought a scale and my weight hasn't changed beyond about a five pound range, plus or minus, in years. I can hike much longer distances again, though.

*I did want to exercise more but was dealing with plantar fasciitis, possibly contributing to the last bit of weight gain.

"I'm not overeating, my net caloric intake is zero!"

Having just come from a 125 year old auditorium, I'm struck by how people must have been smaller or less personal spacey back then.

Was it full of Fran Liebowitz chairs?

No, but she's very small. Had a huge chair though.

142: I've seen some fairly chunky lads in ER / A&E.

My trajectory has been from 90 kg or so up to 100 kg! around when my kid was born and then back to 90 kg again. A ten year process. BMI now in the 23-24 range. I can't really relate to the 'dieting is futile' thinking because that's not my experience. That said:

- I have an almost unlimited food budget: I now pretty much only buy what I know is healthy. So: salmon, broccoli, lentils, etc. This spending got a big push from my shitty (for me) blood numbers from last year. Not everyone has this privilege, but then again, Americans ... very many of you are very well paid;

- I do three hours a week of high-ish intensity exercise; have done this consistently for, what, two decades?

The only conclusion I've come to is that - absent drugs - you can modify your satiety response ... a bit. Protein really does help you stay satiated. And if you edge your portions down a bit, you'll adjust over time, and want to stop sooner. And all of it is a job; part-time, maybe, but definitely a job.

And one other conclusion, really, from looking around. In the food and activity environment that we have, people are like trees: as they get older, they add rings. Inexorably and slowly.

Oh, and almost no alcohol now either. 4-6 units a week or something. It gets a bit dull.

69: I'm convinced that the interventions to be made here are all on the manufacturing and retail side. It's just not desirable for half of the shelf space in your local supermarket to be dedicated to sugar products / processed foods / alcohol.

Less sure about the solution, but my hunch is that it involves more cooking. Done by whom? And when? If fast food actually mainly consisted of vegan feijoada and variants thereof, there'd be some health improvements observed (I reckon).

40: yes; people generally, and speaking broadly, aren't well qualified (or in some cases resourced) to buy / prepare / serve the food that best promotes their own flourishing. I know that sounds off, but it follows just from observing how it works for athletes, actors, etc. who do have access to nutrition support (and how nutrition is obviously failing in other environments). If the socialisation of medicine is OK (state licensing and funding of doctors) then so is the socialisation of food. At least make the good stuff available.

40: yes; people generally, and speaking broadly, aren't well qualified (or in some cases resourced) to buy / prepare / serve the food that best promotes their own flourishing. I know that sounds off, but it follows just from observing how it works for athletes, actors, etc. who do have access to nutrition support (and how nutrition is obviously failing in other environments). If the socialisation of medicine is OK (state licensing and funding of doctors) then so is the socialisation of food. At least make the good stuff available.

The National Weight Control Registry's data tells us what works: calorie restriction, moderately intense exercise several days a week, and calorie tracking. It's just very hard and places all the onus on the individual to try to work around a world that doesn't make it easy and actively makes it harder, and then conflates health with fashion thin.

Danny Lavery has a substack and a Dear Prudie book

I should really lose 25-30 lbs. Wouldn't hurt with the back problems. I was skiing in Utah this week, and fell in really deep snow: it took me a lot longer to get up than I would have liked, and that would've been different too. As Cala says, though, you have to make it a job-like hobby, and after 20 years of off and on effort on this, I just think this job sucks. I kind of thought learning I had diabetes would help my motivation, but even that doesn't work as well as it should.

Wrapping the thread all the way around to the beginning, if you've got a diabetes diagnosis, has your doctor considered one of these new drugs for you? Or are they inappropriate for some reason?

171:. I have run across a number of mature adults who can ski but struggle getting up when they fall. It's hard! Requires a lot of power, and powder doesn't make it easier.

Reminds me that I'm supposed to see Cocaine Bear soon.

I seem to relentlessly put on 1-2 lbs per year, despite being increasingly restrictive with my "full-time hobby" as we're euphemistically calling it now. I find it very depressing that I'm merely slowing how fast I gain, and not actually maintaining a steady weight.

The main problem is social situations - I can't figure out how to, uh, practice the bassoon while my attention is on people around me. I end up just enjoying myself and my bassoon-playing goes to shit.

However, I did fine during the pandemic.

Maybe the solution is to be antisocial.

On the actual article: it sounds like a gamer changer to have something that takes away the need for willpower. I'm extremely fortunate in that my appetite nearly perfectly yields a weight I'm more or less happy with*, and it still up-and-down regulates pretty well (hungrier when exercising a lot, less hungry when not.). Definitely notice when I eat junk but mostly in terms of energy levels.

*I don't think I'd be described as thin (not lanky enough) but "compact" is about right. But Christ the distribution of body fat is annoying in one's forties. What is this upper arm business?

177: I'd love to be more antisocial.

I like practicing the bassoon as a euphemism.

The thing about weight losing as a hobby is that it involves a whole lot of not eating. I can do hours of not-eating at a stretch, but it's only an incremental few minutes of not eating at mealtime that makes all the difference.

(I can't really walk or run as a thing, or stand up, or lift anything heavy. I can and do ride a bike in season, and can ski. I should probably look into swimming. And I'll definitely ask about the drugs.)

179: At the next faculty meeting, say "I just want to remind everyone that it is O.K. to be white."

175.2: Yeah, my weight is where I want it now without an insane amount of work because I live alone so better than half my meals aren't with other people. Eating around other people immediately turns into more alcohol and more desserts.

My stomach is killing me and I had to quit drinking again. This deeply annoys me.

Scotch and milk is soothing.

I have a White Russian once and ever since I've refused drinks with milk and Cohen Brother's movies.

I had a cement mixer once and the White Russian was worse.

At the next faculty meeting, I'll just say that it's okay to be drinking White Russians.

Grasshoppers? That's cream, not milk.

I meant dairy in general. Unless there's a cheese shot.

https://www.cheeseprofessor.com/blog/bartenders-cheese-cocktails

Of course there is.

That is a thing. Huh.

I got a little view into another family's weight issues when a friend invited us to a summer cottage with his parents. He's a doctor, and he weighs probably 300 lbs. It's a little hard for me to guess. He's 40ish, and he has knee pain that makes it hard to walk more than a mile or so. His parents both recently had bariatric surgery, and he's considering it. Neither of his parents appeared to be in particularly good health (they moved slowly, shuffled their feet, seemed to have poor balance), but the way they lived was pretty foreign to me. They were going across the street to a neighbor's pool, and they took the car. They have strict rules for food consumption because of the surgery, but at every meal, they ate at least one extra "one more won't hurt" serving of something on the table. It made me so nervous, and I can't imagine now my friend feels about watching his parents drop weight rapidly, then plateau, then (I assume) regain. Our friend has a husband who's very into fitness, lost a lot of weight, and eats healthy, so he's got support at home, but his job is stressful, and food is comfort in a way for him that it just isn't for me. I don't know where in his life he'd get that pleasure and relaxation if it wasn't from food, and I don't know how his parents would be able to shift away from "food is pleasure, food is a reward, food is a treat" even with a drug like this.

AJ and I are starting to notice that some friends (and their kids, which is even more surprising to me) can't seem to keep up physically when we do low-intensity physical activities. I felt bad dragging a group on 3 little walks around town, maybe 3 or 4 miles total, last fall, maybe 2 h of easy, flat forest broken up and with breaks to look at fallen trees or ponds. Partway through, we needed to stop and buy water for them, and when we got back, they were all clearly kind of wiped.

I guess what I'm saying is that I guess I'm hitting an age (40s) where there does seem to be a noticeable cost for being overweight or underconditioned. I'm thinking I should be more conscious in a way I didn't need to before about friends' physical endurance and abilities, but I'm also a little worried about them. It's a really hard problem, and I'd love for it to have an easy solution like walkable everything and mixed-use development and good food everywhere and for modern life not to suck quite so much that everyone's too burnt out to do anything but come home from their 10 hour day and watch TV. I'm curious how the drugs will work long-term. Did you catch the note about thyroid issues? Ugh.

an easy solution like walkable everything and mixed-use development and good food everywhere and for modern life not to suck quite so much that everyone's too burnt out to do anything but come home from their 10 hour day and watch TV.

"Easy" is doing a lot of work there.

I was on Ozempic and am now on Mounjaro, for diabetes but mainly weight loss. I fucking love it. Love.

Someone or other said something like "you aren't fat because you are lazy, you are lazy because you're fat", with the interpretation that bodyfat sends out signals to rest and stop moving. What Mounjaro felt like was that my body's hormonal state got slammed back to my old energetic self, and my fat proportion is just going to have to go down to match it. Literally the day after I took the very first intro dose, before I felt any appetite suppression, I casually thought on our way home from getting Steady from school, 'let's not go home, let's go to the park to play catch'. Which we did. It has felt like returning to the energy of my thirties and forties, before all the post-pregnancy and post-trauma weight. The urge to sit has gone away and initiating all movement feels so much easier.

I also love the appetite suppression and the quiet in my head instead of food noise. I do love the weight loss, about 10% so far. Ironically, I am not convinced it is controlling my blood sugar levels as much as I'd like, although it makes it possible for me to eat a low-carb diet that does control my blood sugar level.

If it weren't causing weight loss, I would still want it, for the energy and the relief from food noise in my head. But it is causing weight loss without the work of a second job and that has been extremely nice as well. If you qualify and your insurance would pay, I say get it. Skip Ozempic, straight to Mounjaro. That said, it is forever once you start.

So how does smoking fit into this? or helmet laws?

I would totally buy a smoking helmet if it was under, say, $300 or so and didn't require expensive filters to be changed every 30 days.

I'm a lot springier and fitter feeling than I was in my early forties, and I was ten years younger then, but I'm a bunch lighter now.

Solidarity, sister. Me as well. I'm at the borderline of BMI-based healthy/overweight at 6'0, 180-185 but I think it's pretty much my ideal size. I've had a *way* better relationship with my feet and knees since dropping 40 lb and wearing better shoes.

I'm thinking of asking my doctor about ketamine. Just in case he's having a day where he's feeling reckless.

Maybe start with asking your vet?

194: forever as in its effects go away when you stop? Or something else?

Effects go away when you stop. It is so new that it isn't clear if there are other bad effects but stopping means returning to the pre-Mounjaro baseline and from what I read on the forums, most of us wouldn't want that.

It feels like suddenly having a pleasant healthy relationship to food (moderate amounts that don't take willpower, no obsessing, no cravings). It'd be worse to go back to baseline.

192: shiv is slowing down more than I am (desk job, chunky boi, also different preferences) and it's getting really noticeable with the kids. They want to do sporty things (ski, bike, hike) and I can keep up with them. He can't (less endurance). So this led to a division of labor which mostly worked until my ACL injury which means my kids lost their skiing/biking hobby, a backpacking trip, too.

194: forever as in its effects go away when you stop? Or something else?

The way that the two qualities (food normalization and energy for movement) can be delivered by weekly injection really reinforces my belief that it was never about will power.

Or that "willpower" is just a way we experience systems we don't understand.

Speaking of Washington Post columnists, though not in this thread, I just realized that Damon Young, who appeared with Fran Lebowitz, was a Washington Post columnist.

He seemed fine.

197: She has a sign "I don't give horse medication to people". Probably just about Ivermectin, but I don't know for sure.

How was the show? Bummed that there's no stop near me planned.

It's kind of different from most shows. She talked with Damon Young for a half hour and then took questions from the audience for an hour and mostly replied by turning the answers into complaints. I enjoyed it, but it wouldn't be good for someone who isn't a fan.

The National Weight Control Registry's data tells us what works: calorie restriction, moderately intense exercise several days a week, and calorie tracking.

For a while I qualified to join the NWCR - I even sent in my info and got a packet, but I don't think I completed it - and I would have reported the same method; but wow, that didn't last either.

208: I've never had to lose more than 10-15 pounds, but exercise and no snacking helps. Eating on,y one meal a day 2 times a week was also effective.

Maybe I'm no good at ketosis, but I have real trouble functioning without regular meals.

209: Anything sensible sounding works, the problem is keeping it up forever.

i know someone who took one of these drugs for cosmetic weight loss reasons (a beverly hills doctor offered "what adele took" to her at a party) and she ended up in the woah we didn't mean *that* kind of weight loss - it was scary for a bit, but she's back to a low but healthy weight now and able to enjoy food once more.

I've been trying Atomoxetine for ADHD again at a different dose (after dropping it because of side effects to try wellbutrin, which did nothing), and I have decreased appetite as a side effect. But the weird thing is that it's not so much that I don't feel hungry, as that it just turns the hunger feelings down in intensity at which point they're pretty easy to ignore or forget about. Coming off of it, there was a week or two where I had the reverse effect and my hunger feelings were just turned way up, which was really disconcerting. Anyway, this is just to say that "decreased appetite" can cover a lot of different subjective experiences, and I wonder what happens with these particular drugs. And also makes me wonder to what extent the intensity of feelings of hunger varies from person-to-person. I've always had somewhat of a problem with just skipping breakfast or forgetting to eat a meal, which I think has contributed to my heartburn issues, but this also makes not snacking pretty easy for me, not because of willpower but just because I'm not paying attention to being hungry.

211: at my height and frame without exercise, I would only need 1400 calories a day. With exercise, I can do 1800. I find it not terribly hard to eat 650-700 calorie meals 2x a day but eating three 450 calorie meals would be a lot of mental effort, and I suspect I wouldn't feel full.

Fasting for a day is ok. I still drink a caffeinated beverage and take electrolyte tablets when I went 36 hours without eating. I think that a lot of the time when people are "hungry" and eat mindlessly, they need salt and potassium more than calories.

I also felt alert when I wasn't using all that energy to digest food.

197: That's catamine. Not to be confused with cat o'mine, cat o'nine, catamite, or indeed cat-a-might.

According to the Mayo Clinic's website, I can eat 2,200 calories a day. My grip just hooked me up with a box of Samoas and a box of Tagalongs, so I'll have to be careful.

I used to try to stretch out time between meals/IF/wait till early afternoon to eat breakfast sorts of things. But inevitably I overcompensate at night. At some point it stopped feeling like an accomplishment to stretch out my fasting, and just started to feel unpleasant. So now I eat smaller/more frequently, which feels much more pleasant, and like others have said, if I'm intentional about protein, I don't feel too hungry.

Is it "working"? idk. My bassoon keeps slowly growing, under any plan. It's depressing.

193: I don't literally think those are easy, but I also don't think any of those single "solutions" would make the population generally thin again . . .

I still want the life described after "easy".

I'm not going to make a contrabassoon joke. I'm sorry you're frustrated, heebie. It does feel like the rules are different suddenly in one's early 40s. (Wrong kind of doc, but: thyroid OK?)

Like get your thyroid removed or looked at or refurbished or what?

@217

Sorry to hear that. Have you considered slimfast (powder)? I'm not saying that you should use it to diet. But keep it around. If you are feeling hungry and cranky, make yourself an 8 oz shake with slim milk. You will be full for around 3-4 hours. It's basically just fiber. Everyone focuses on protein, but fiber really fills you up.

You can get the same effect with prunes (which taste quite good, if you like plums) or dates.

Prunes are the tray tastiest way to have to spend lots of time shitting that I've ever found.

My family just ate the Samoas that I was probably saving for breakfast.

-tray

I stress-drank 32 liters of Mountain Dew reading this thread, and now I weigh 450 pounds even after throwing up (several times) on your lawn. WHAT SHOULD I DO NOW, THE DRUGS OR THE LOX PRUNES

Lox prunes? Like, stuffed with smoked salmon? That could be good, I guess.

Huh, I thought dates were basically candy (as opposed to protein candy bars, which are chicken), but I guess the glycemic index is not so high. Suddenly I actually want to wrap a date in kimchi and eat it. I am definitely craving something other than food; I suspect it is books.

I admit I don't eat fish, but you could probably convince me to eat a prune with smoked almonds inside. I'm also still waiting for the genetically engineered apricot tree with almonds in place of pits.

229 last: what a great idea! Right behind you in line for that.

||
Oh man, pardon my heart eyes for a moment, but I'm so glad they asked exactly the right person for a quote for this WaPo article, "Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest at Stanford. Students are obsessed."

Adrian Daub, a Stanford professor of comparative literature and German studies, author of "What Tech Calls Thinking," sees an encouraging sign in Stanford being only peripherally involved in the Bankman-Fried scandal. That might not have been the case 10 years ago, he notes, when the Silicon Valley hype machine operated at more of a fever pitch than it does today.

"Other than his physical location, it's actually not that connected to us for once," Daub says. "In that way, it's a sign of progress," and also "a little bit melancholy."

"Stanford was a place where the future was shaped, and it's quite possible that's not happening anymore -- that it's happening in the Bahamas now and only comes to Palo Alto once it gets indicted."

|>

I had lox for brunch.

With unusually large capers.

The bagel was adequate.

@234

Try makings your own bagels. King Arthur's flour has a bagel recipe online. They also sell sourdough starter.

I'm just going to go back to the place with the $2 bagels that are great.

221: checking for hypothyroid, which can lead to weight gain.

Dates = the highest conceivable GI, surely. Nice in a tagine though.

Well this thread got a bit gloomy. Maybe it will help if I share a link to my favourite Brazilian neighbourhood restaurant: https://www.instagram.com/pipocavegan/

@238

One would think, right? But they are actually a low glycemic index food. Safe for diabetics in moderation.

I don't think lox is vegan.

I guess bagels aren't that good in glycemic grounds. That's what the cream cheese is for.

I like that the bagel recipe recommended uses effective onomatopoeia, but there's no way I can do anything that complex and not fuck it up.

Another bagel recipe that's more ambitious than I would attempt, but a good read: https://smittenkitchen.com/2007/09/bronx-worthy-bagels/

I use the home fries recipe from that site (with paprika as the only spice other than salt and pepper). It's really easy and solved my potato-frying problem (because you microwave them first).

But once a recipe has "Day One" in it, I'm done.

(with paprika as the only spice other than salt and pepper)

If you like a hot paprika the one Burlap & Barrel sells is really good (expensive, but some of the best paprika I've had).

I'm not at a place in my life where I can deal with having more than one paprika jar in the house.

244. Hot or sweet paprika?

245. All recipes for stews and casseroles should say, "Best made the day before and reheated when you want to eat."

@246

I like making Goulash, but we are out of spicy paprika. What is your opinion of Burlap & Barrel as opposed to Penzeys Spices?

Did movie theaters switch to assigned seats so they can charge more or just because?

What is your opinion of Burlap & Barrel as opposed to Penzeys Spices?

I know other people like Penzey's; I've only ordered from the twice and was disappointed both times -- the spices just didn't feel fresh and fragrant. For a long time I was quite loyal to world spice, but as their prices have gone up I was curious to try alternatives. I ordered from Burlap & Barrel and was quite pleased. I did end up spending more than would be completely reasonable, but their spices have ranged from good to exceptional. In addition to the paprika, their garlic and Oregano Buds are both notably good. I haven't tried many of their chilis yet, but there are several that I'm curious about and will get at some point.

I also appreciate the idea behind their Origin blends. The only one I've tried -- the five spice -- was quite good.

250: I think it started during Covid, because they were limiting the number of people, and trying to space them out, but now AMC started charging extra for the good seats which is total bullshit

"Cocaine Bear" is unwatchable because of the gore, but they really did nail the 80s anesthetic visually.

252: This is an AMC theater.

Maybe they all are?

The comments above about weight loss being like a time consuming hobby are definitely true. Losing weight and getting fitter is going well at the moment, and it's not especially painful as I like exercising--I'd do more than I do, even now, if I had the time and wasn't an injury risk--and I'm not in such a big calorie deficit that I feel genuinely hungry on a regular basis. But it is a financial investment and a time investment. More time cooking, more time exercising, more time on the administrative labour of checking what I eat.

I'm time poor, rather than cash poor, but it would be almost impossible to keep up even the moderate level of time and cash investment I do if you were working long hours* in some minimum wage job.

The thing that always drives me a bit crazy is that I've always been naturally quite active. Not in the sense of being someone who does Iron Man events or Cross-Fit, but I like getting out and about and walking, or riding a bike, and I generally make choices to minimise driving. I'm also not a binge eater. I seem to just have a natural daily appetite about 5% higher than I actually burn so my weight creeps back up over time. It feels like my base level of satiety was set when I was in my 20s and 30s, and very physically active, and when I still had a thyroid. Post-thyroidectomy, it's just not the same. Estimates of caloric expenditure aren't very accurate for me. I know, because I have a couple of years of really good records, exactly how much food I consume, how much exercise I do, and how much I've weighed throughout those periods, so I need to discount the recommendations a bit.

* I work long hours, but I'm not on minimum wage.

I'd planned to go skiing today, but it was too windy and they closed the lifts. It's like a snow day at work before the internet was invented: just can't do the hobby/job today. Bad attitude, and my health is going to 'fire' me eventually, but I'm unrepentant nonetheless.

I wonder how weight gain relates to having kids?

One vignette: yesterday Atossa was selling Girl Scout cookies. Cassandane and I took turns supervising her and running errands. Atossa asked each of us to buy her cookies and we agreed, not knowing that the other one would/already had. I don't think the kid planned that but I can't be sure.

Another vignette: this afternoon we took Atossa and a friend of hers to an ice skating rink. We brought modest snacks: two granola bars or similar, one for each kid. There's a break shortly after we get there for the Zamboni machine to do its thing and someone looks at the food options nearby and suggests gelato. (OK, it was probably me. I figured it was a sweet treat for the kids, and probably lower calorie than anything we could get from the pizza place.) So we get four kids' size gelatos. Good for Cassandane and I for not getting something bigger, right? The Zamboni is done before the kids are done eating, so Atossa gives Cassandane her gelato to finish. Cassandane offers some to me. About half an hour later, I'm going for a walk around the park and Cassandane calls me. Atossa has fallen and got bruised - nothing serious, but she's taking a break and crying. While I was gone, Cassandane forgot we had brought the granola bars and offered to get garlic knots from the pizza place. We leave about 45 minutes after that. The kid's friend stays for dinner. After dinner, we have girl scout cookies for dessert. The kid's friend is careless or hasty opening one bag and mangles it. I guess we'd better eat that one fast before they go stale!

At a high level I know weight gain correlates negatively with birth rates, but I can't help but wonder if you could find a relationship if you controlled for enough variables or a specific age range of the kids or something.

I think the biggest effect of kids on weight comes from how they really limit your free time.

I mean, if you're a dude. The whole pregnancy plus aliens-except-lower thing sounds rough.

@251

Thank you for those recommendations! I'll look into them.

More time cooking: can't be argued with. I thought I knew how to cook earlier in my life; these days - because I want to compress this time to zero - I am a merciless kitchen robot: chop, sauté, deglaze, simmer, done. Or roasting things: trades electricity for labour. Kids come out about even in terms of effect on weight, I reckon. There are penalties, but you also feel bad if you don't cook right for them, and this means you cook right for yourself (hopefully).

Two potential efficiencies. One is ingredient substitution. Takes no more time to cook lentils than it does rice, but only one of them is helpful to you. Fish is as quick to cook as a steak. The other is active travel, I guess: you were going there anyway.

Will still go on about how the food industry _could_ help much more than it does. The mix of stuff on offer is just not right.

re: 262

Yeah. In terms of cooking, the biggest barrier for me is getting enough protein* in through the day without resorting to eating crap or not eating enough vegetables. Which often means cooking so fish or meat in the air fryer either with some vegetables at the same time, or steaming the veg in the microwave while the meat/fish cooks. Main evening meals have always been pretty healthy, for the same reason you give, I'm trying to cook well for my son.

Re: food industry, it does feel like there could be a lot done to produce quick convenient to cook packages, yeah. Pricing is also a barrier. The foods I am choosing to eat while losing weight are quite expensive, and I'm buying and cooking from scratch, rather than from some meal prep service. I suspect I should be looking at routes to buying meat or fish in larger quantities and freezing but we live in a flat, so don't have some gigantic chest freezer.

Getting my cycling miles back up is helpful (I do about 3 - 4 hrs a week). I had a break for a few months as my bike was out of commission and I had a minor bit of knee pain. I don't think it helps massively in terms of weight loss, but if I've done 2 hours on the bike, I can grab a bit of cake and a coffee at a cafe on the way back. It does help in terms of mental state--it's really nice to just bugger off and be outside on my own for a bit--and overall quality of life, though.

* as per the standard advice you get from a lot of guides, I do find that getting a decent amount of protein in every day helps with not feeling hungry, but also seems to help with weight loss and body composition in general. If I up the percentage of my food that I get from protein, while keeping everything overall about the same (in terms of kcal), I do seem to lose fat more quickly. As we are not naturally a big meat eating family, I think I chronically don't eat enough protein unless I make the effort.

Re: protein, you are the exception in not getting enough. I came across an article in an ecological journal not long ago talking about ecosystem effects of humans eating diets with excessive protein (= more excess nitrogen that gets pissed away and heads to aquatic ecosystems impacting rivers and estuaries). Looking at my family we definitely get way more protein than we need. I should eat rice and salad three dinners a week but meat and a side are popular.

I mean, for some definitions of "excess." Mostly what I'm saying is that in bulk, humans in developed countries eat much more than the historical norm.

re: 264

Probably there's a disparity between the number that is ecologically optimum for people as a whole vs the amount of protein someone needs who is trying to recomp their body to simultaneously reduce fat and increase lean muscle mass. Esp. someone who weighs 100kg. But yeah, I suspect, in general, I have historically eaten quite a bit less meat than would be, for example, the standard American norm.

The protein RDA is approx 86g of protein per day for someone my bodyweight, and there are lots of reasons why that RDA is on the low side. My own historic protein intake would definitely be under that RDA amount, for sure, though. Generally, I'm aiming for a target that is at the low end or somewhat under the ISSN guidelines (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28642676/).

263: question about air fryers. I just learned about these things a few months ago. I realize that I'm late to the party, but now I want one. What kind do you have? Is it a drawer-style or oven style? Would you buy the same one again or something different if you were in the market now?

According to Pokémon Go, I've walked a kilometer while sitting at my desk. There are sweet spots where the GPS gets it wrong like that.

But enough sports talk.

For some reason, the wild Snorlaxes aren't near my office, but are hanging out with the Mormons down the street.

re: 267

I have a smallish Cosori one. Like this: https://cosori.com/products/pro-le-5-0-quart-air-fryer (the UK version is very slightly different, but it's basically the same)

We've been very happy with it. My wife has gone from being a total skeptic to a total convert, more because it's quicker and there's less smell and mess than the oven. It does a better job with some food, too. In retrospect, given how often we use it, we might have been better off getting a bigger one, or one with two drawers.

271: there was a recall on some of the COSORIs in the US. I am eyeing the Instant 9 quart Versazone which can either be 2 separate independent drawers or one larger one, but it's $200 right now. The price in pounds is about the same as dollars, so much more expensive for you. They had a sale in the fall for Black Friday when it was $120.

I was also looking at the cosori dual blaze. Either way, I'm hoping to catch a sale.

I haven't found it particularly hard to eat healthfully after having kids but there are definitely more opportunities for snacks than there would be otherwise.

I also don't know what to believe about protein. I feel better and leaner when I get more but it's not sustainable at my size without a protein powder or truly absurd dietary changes and there's a lot of bioscience. I'm currently using a protein powder post-injury but there's no way optimal health requires this much whey.

Is "Japanese Milk Bread" high in protein? My usual breakfast sandwich guy is closed on Monday, so I had to go to the fancy place (or the 7-Eleven).

Vaguely the same on protein -- I don't track anything closely, but when I'm actively trying to keep my weight down, the only way it works for me is preferentially eating protein-heavy foods and avoiding carbs. I have a huge sweet tooth, so I'm not getting close to anything that would qualify as a keto diet, but a rice-based meal is something I'd only eat occasionally. Although I do love risotto.

Too much stirring.

I've discovered that the expensive rice tastes better than the regular rice (both long grain white rice). I don't understand why, but even people who don't know which rice I cooked can tell.

277: I agree with you about avoiding starchy carbs like pasta, but a I wonder if you could do the same with a bit of legumes and more healthy fats and fiber. Fat is so dense in calories that it doesn't take a high percentage by volume for it to be a huge percentage of calories.

The long distance hiking people are all about caloric density, so they don't carry too much weight. If it were possible to exist on only olive oil without feeling like shit, they would do that.

280: I am in no way a rigorous nutrition tracker -- I think of legumes as protein rather than carbs.

https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/best-elliptical-machines-13771768.html

280: got it. See above. They are a good source of protein, but plant proteins (other than manufactured protein powders) have a lot less protein than animal sources. Which is probably plenty!

279. There are definitely grades of basmati rice, not indicated in a systematic way on the packaging. Deer brand is pretty reliable, but I haven't seen it this year. The brand in lurid silver packaging sold by the 10-lb bag rather than 20lb sack is good.

Also, because rice is so common in parts of the South and diabetes is really high, there is a bioengineered high protein rice from Louisiana which 8ntrigues me.

https://parishrice.com

re: 275 and 277

I listened to a long (interminably long) podcast with some big name protein/nutrition researcher, and I came away convinced enough that the sort of ISSN guidelines from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28642676/ are probably reasonably OK as a guide. So I sort of aim for approx 1.3-ish grammes of protein per kilo of body mass, which is way less than bodybuilders and bro-science types advocate for, but which definitely (from personal experience) helps me feel less hungry and seems to aid in fat loss and muscle gain. I probably end up eating less than that about half the time, but it's vaguely where I aim.

I do eat carbs. I love rice, and couscous and all kinds of grains, so going without them is a hardship, and would make losing weight impossible to stick to, so I just tend to have a small-ish portion of them, and usually not for every cooked meal. But it'd be unusual not to have at least one portion of something like that a day.

I also don't know what to believe about protein. I feel better and leaner when I get more but it's not sustainable at my size without a protein powder or truly absurd dietary changes and there's a lot of bioscience. I'm currently using a protein powder post-injury but there's no way optimal health requires this much whey.

Same thoughts here. Helps me a lot with satiety. I do dumb bro whey powders and quest bars. I feel idiotic about it, but it is easy to keep them around and they're shelf stable.

Just eating beef jerky could work.

277: the only way it works for me is preferentially eating protein-heavy foods and avoiding carbs.

This me, and have tried varying degrees of it (tried Atkins stuff a few times). If I can stay with relatively more protein (actually it is almost certainly the smaller absolute number of carbs that is doing the trick) I can slowly lose weight as long as I do not succumb to night munchies which is not a given; the cravings often win when faced with going to bed the least bit "hungry" (I swear my body senses that I am actually doing it! About to lose weight and fight back --no fat cell left behind). I have wondered if I had through my life had my daytime eating regime without the night snacks* what would have been the result (but can't really tease that out of course even as a thought experiment it is not really valid).

I will say that I do not have the experience of protein make me "full", I really do not feel as satiated as I do with carbs.

*I have also wondered that about peanut butter (related as a pb sandwich is a favorite nighttime snack). I believe WC Fields did say on his deathbed that he wondered how his life would have been without the booze. "Peanut butter was his nemesis" should be on my gravestone. I had sort of decided t not to get a new jar recently when the old one ran out, but no, the demon spread won out yet again.

281: caloric density

Back in the day my favorite for that was a compresssed block of pitted dates. A bit heavy, but very compact and a quick boost when energy flagged.

This post and thread were all a bit too close to home for me. Have reached an overly retroactively contemplative stage of life and with an annoyed/regretful twist added by my first real serious back problems. I had not ever expected to be fairly obese for a good chunk of my life, but there we were.

I was extremely active up through my early 30s (and pretty active since) and just taken a bit by surprise when the 20 or so pounds I gained during my wife's first pregnancy turned ultimately into an 60-80 more. Took of ~40 right after retirement too the benefit of knees and ability to engage in various activities but am still above where I would have ever thought and think knees and back would benefit from anout 30-40 coming off (my orthopedic and PT guys encouage that but do point out that there are many bad knees and backs among the less weighted).

Not that anyone cares but I do go over my trajectory on body size/weight (and my perception of same):

Childhood: Big but a relatively skinny, very fast runner.
Adolescence thought early adult: Bulked up quite a bit lost some speed relative to others but basically a quite fit athlete.
Early 30s to early 40s: Gaining quite a bit of weight.
Early 40s to early 60s: Really ballooned. I do think fairly stressful (to me) jobs were a key factor.
Since early 60s and retirement. Big drop to early 40s level but stalled there. Pandemic and politics didn't help. Rage eating is a thing for me.

Anyway, life's rich paegent brought several different configurations.

OP: I remember hearing at some point that the most universal, robust difference between overweight people and thin people is hunger and something like "food palatability" - how appetizing do you generally find food?

Let me finally adds some thought s on the issue of hunger/satiety.

My main point of observation is my youngest--still rail-thin--son who really has a different approach to food compared to me and my other two children (neither have yet followed my lead but both "struggle" to not gain weight).
My youngest would sometimes forget to eat until afternoon or just eat very little. He just does not seem hungry in the way I am. His wife protests that Troy is always "hungry" and I point out that "Yeah, because he doesn't eat very much." Bu twhatever he feels is clearly different. He certainly does not seem to snack much. No idea what that is and if it will change for him, but interesting to observe.

Finally, I do think the move to constant snacking has been a thing for society (and me). Most gas stations had maybe a soda machine and maybe a candy machine when I was young. Cause and effect not easy to tease apart of course.

292 was what I was trying to get at in 213, and I'm really curious whether the new medications directly act on the subjective feeling of hunger. It was really interesting to have my subjective feeling of hunger change dramatically. 292.last is exactly the point, it's not about how often you're hungry, but how much it bothers you, and those are not at all the same thing.

278. I've seen recipes by actual Italians which involve almost no stirring. But they involve scarily exact timing. You have to know your cooker, your pot and your rice very well.

I'm old friends with the pot and the cooker. The rice is new.

292, 294: They do act directly on hunger. It is a striking change for me.

294: Yeah, I should query him some more on what his impression of it is.

I thought Richard Simmons described my "approach" well when he was being interviewed by Dick Cavett (IIRC). He said something along the lines of, "If I were to reach down into this sofa a pull out a moldy M&M my impulse would be to eat it."

Ah, thanks, I missed 194.

"If I were to reach down into this sofa a pull out a moldy M&M my impulse would be to eat it."

I feel this, and this is precisely why my eldest holds the rest of us slovenly pigs in such contempt.

It is like being yanked sideways into an uncomplicated relationship with food. It isn't just hunger and satiety; it is also that all the thinking about food goes away. It is lovely.

Ozempic didn't work like that for me (or very much at all). But Mounjaro does.

Speaking above of various ways to tax people into eating less, McDonald's is really expensive. I hadn't been at one in a year. It was $7 for a McDouble and small fries. I feel thinner already.

301: Victoria (liraglutide) a diabetes drug had some modest weight gain in some patients, but it's not approved for that. I heard an endocrinologist talk about her patients' experience of weight loss on the drug. She said, that for a small percentage of them, it wasn't work. They just found broiled fish and vegetables tasty in a way they never had before and they didn't want the chocolate.

303: The last time I stopped in one on a highway, I was shocked by the prices. Also, I can't prove it, but I think they changed the brand of coffee, because it doesn't taste good anymore. The Newman's own was a reliable, affordable cup.

The normalization of snacking has to be part of the problem. In theory, it shouldn't matter whether one has six small snacky meals or three meals and no snacks, but to me it seems like every opportunity for snacking is mostly a chance to eat prepackaged junk, and it's easier to overeat if one is conditioning oneself to eat all the time. I'm a massive outlier here socially, though. I pack snacks for the kids when they're out doing something active but there is no expectation that they ought to have a snack just for going shopping or to the playground.

I should have gone to the Arby's.

This is such a cliched thing, but I do get annoyed with how much junk food is in the schools. "Daniel brings in donuts on Fridays!"
Me: "Oh, was it his birthday?"
Them: "No! On Fridays!"

That was a real one from earlier this year. I doubt it's kept up all year long, but I would have no way of knowing, either way.

There's a new Dunkin by my office.

It's not Kosher like the one by my house.

It's possible the Calabat is from a different planet. I packed them cookies for skiing yesterday. There were four. The kids each had one and Pebbles wanted more. Shiv agreed - to the extent that there's a house rule it's that you can eat all the snacks on ski days -- and the Calabat pipes up with "no, we've probably had enough sugar, somehow Pebbles agrees and anyway they got the cookies in their lunches today."

Well, 300+ comments and over 3 days on, it's super clear how disordered my thinking about food and body image still is. That's just great. I really appreciated E. Messily's comment 26 above.

Yours is?

Oh, dear. This is stuff that always does successfully get a conversation going, but it's really easy for it to be unpleasant to read, depending on your own specifics. I hope the thread didn't make things worse for you.

Well I missed most of the thread since I'm trying to spend less time online so I don't know that I have anything to add from my recent experience. Social media addiction is another vice that externally manifests.
I went almost precisely from 100kg to 80kg in 6 months, so that's... carry the 1, Fourier transform... 20% loss, now right at the BMI border of normal/overweight. It's hard to not be thinking constantly about how to avoid eating too much. I bottomed out about 5lb below where I am, and having that 5lb come back over a month or two was psychologically straining. Am I gaining it all back? Why can't I lose more? Are the new clothes I just bought going to fit in another month? In reality I think I gained back some muscle because I can feel it in my legs and my lowest weight was after I had surgery and was inactive for several weeks.
I am curious if I tried the drugs now whether I'd lose more or maintain but without the food obsession. Mostly I'm dealing with it by continuing to track intake and set routines. It's a little boring eating the same smoothie/fruit/protein bar combos every day but not the worst thing. I am very reliant on the protein smoothies but you can make a wide enough variety to keep it satisfying- vanilla or chocolate, coffee or not, banana, strawberry, mango, passion fruit, etc. Keeping that for my "normal" days then gives me flexibility to go off script at parties or vacation which so far hasn't been disastrous, 5lb rebound aside. We have a 1 week trip to Italy then a 4 week Europe trip later this year which are going to be tough, along with the annoyance of already worrying about what I'm going to eat several months ahead of time.
The hardest time to stay on track is like heebie said- at night, when I've been restrained all day and only eaten 1200 calories so I have some freedom, then I go and eat another 1500 because the kids are having ice cream or we're having pasta for dinner or I'm out of spaghetti squash. I need some strategy for handling that.

Sorry, 312 was jerky. I just couldn't tell if you'd said something above that you were saying revealed disordered thinking, or if you were saying that everyone else's protein-gazing was leaving you the odd one out.

306: Sir, this is an eclectic Web magazine.

Yeah, no judgment on anyone else and I decided not to go into detail about how my mind works (i.e. not so well). Sorry for ambiguity.

A funny thing about self image- we're playing in a mixed doubles tennis tournament this month and won in an upset yesterday. I overheard a friend of the team we beat discussing the match with them and she said how they had better skills but "the man on their team was very athletic and quick." I don't believe I've ever heard myself described that way and don't believe her assessment. In this case I write it off as being 15 years younger than them.

I have eaten
all the things
that were in
the icebox

and which
a healthy person would
have saved
for breakfast, lunch, and dinner

it was fucking great

heh

292: 'I remember hearing at some point that the most universal, robust difference between overweight people and thin people is hunger and something like "food palatability" - how appetizing do you generally find food?'

Had to really stop and think about this one. I'm neither overweight nor skinny but do believe that I enjoy food. But maybe less than I thought?

I previously noticed that it's impossible to hide, say, a bar of chocolate from oneself. Just impossible to forget (a) that it exists, uneaten and (b) obviously, where it currently is. But these days I will not finish the bar. So I have faith that habits are alterable to a degree, and because of habituation, duh, it doesn't suck to have altered them.

On the other hand, emotional eating I don't believe that I have ever done. Emotional drinking only.

I previously noticed that it's impossible to hide, say, a bar of chocolate from oneself. Just impossible to forget (a) that it exists, uneaten and (b) obviously, where it currently is.

Counterpoint: Cassandane. I can't count how many times she has said she's hungry, and/or said we're low on candy or potential desserts, only for me to remind her of something she likes perfectly well within easy reach and has forgotten about. It drives me bonkers when I'm trying to eat right. I think the last example was a bag of Skittles in her purse when we were out and about and she got hungry. And it's not a big purse.

I definitely tuck $1 bills around like that and then find them squirreled all over, in case of some emergency.

After my mom had Alzheimer's, she was still going out with the church ladies for breakfast and whatever. So dad would give her cash. She would come home and put the change somewhere and immediately forget where. Dad was too physically impaired to catch her before the hiding. This happened for several years. My sisters found thousands of dollars just randomly around their house.

I just noticed this piece. Did Soldier of Fortune threaten to sue? Because Dilbert is that bad?

re: 321

I've also been able to break some food and drink habits quite consistently over the years. I also stopped smoking over 3 years ago, and haven't lapsed, even once, since then.

I used to drink caffeinated sugary drinks (Coke, mostly), especially when I was very tired or stressed. I go months now without drinking any fizzy drinks. The only time I drink Coke now is if I'm on a long car journey and just need the caffeine and sugar to keep going. I (literally) can't remember the last time I had a sugary fizzy drink. Before Christmas, for sure.

Similarly, I do like sweet foods. I was never someone who binged on them, but I'd probably have something sweet--a small pastry, or a piece of chocolate or something--most mornings with a cup of coffee, mid morning. I broke that habit, too. I still occasionally do it, but it's not a regular thing anymore.

Ditto, though, on the emotional drinking rather than emotional eating.

A "trick" I have at times resorted to is to throw away a snack item after I have reflexively picked up out of habit and then realized it was not "needed." Did it a few times at work to the annoyance/amusement of some of the calorie pushers who always had snack items always out--I guess the polite thing to do would have been to do it out of their sight, but that risked et another change of mind.

AIMHMHB, about 10 years ago, I stopped eating a donut on Donut Friday, after I decided it was making me feel bad later. Not participating in this weekly ritual severed the last tie connecting me to my fellow workers, and so I became completely alienated.

In retrospect, this was good preparation for the pandemic.

You should have tried taking a donut and dropping it uneaten into the trash.