Took a little break from the internet and touched some grass and it was great. Wander back in here after my hiatus and what do I find? Just a thread with a bunch of fatphobia.
Cute.
For a community that is incredibly careful about protecting its users from the -phobias and the -isms, there sure is a hell of a lot of unchecked fatphobia here basically any time fatness gets brought up.
It’s something I’ve noticed on the left in general as well. The leftist org I’m in has almost no fat people in it and something tells me that’s not because there aren’t any fat leftists out there.
Fatphobia is rooted in anti-Blackness and ableism.
I’d highly recommend the “Maintenance Phase” podcast with Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon, as well as Aubrey Gordon’s books “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat” and “You Just Need To Lose Weight.”
TL;DR: There’s mounting evidence that anti-fat bias in medicine is more to blame for poor medical outcomes in fat people rather than just the fat itself.
Diet and exercise don’t result in long-term weight loss for something like 95% of people. As a leftist, are you really gonna sit here and blame this on individual choices rather than systemic issues? Are you really gonna try to convince us that 95% of people are just lacking willpower?
Please note that this thread is not an invitation to convince me I’m wrong or share your own personal anecdotal story of successful long-term weight loss with the implication that others can do it because you did it. This post is a request that any thin person (or thin-adjacent person) reading this who wants to argue about how being fat is bad for your health do some research and some self-crit. This post is a request that this community rethink the way it engages with discussions about fatness, diet, fatphobia, and anti-fat bias.
Anti-fat bias literally kills people.
Ozempic slows digestion and increases satiety in the brain, yes, but it also stimulates secretion of insulin and suppresses glucagon release (you know, the energy signaling molecules, of the sort I mentioned above--I daresay those are playing a role here). Those molecules are critically important to the way the body processes energy, and we still don't understand that system very well (if we did, we'd be able to cure diabetes).
And even if your oversimplification here was accurate, how would that be an argument that CICO is useful? That argument amounts to telling people to ignore their biological drives, all the time, and basically forever. It's like telling someone they need to pee less, as if that's an easy thing to just do.
It's useful because for most of us it's the only way we can realistically regulate our own body weight, which a lot of people want to do. For people who struggle to do that, as well as obviously for people who chose not to, I agree that it's completely useless and somewhat insulting medical advice. But there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm glad you recognize that, but nonetheless, "the baby" in this case is a falsehood. See here for a real-world example: https://hexbear.net/comment/5779945
Edit: better link
It's not a falsehood. First of, one example wouldn't disprove literal decades of research proving the contrary, but also this example isn't incongruent with CICO at all. You can increase caloric consumption and lose weight if other factors causes your body to burn more calories.
Calorie tracking can be useful for some people, yes.
but, that's not the same as CICO. We cannot know nor control actual calories in and actual calories out. Anything we do to estimate them is just that, an estimate. Sure, for some people, those estimates are close enough to be useful. But to bandy CICO around as an absolute is insulting. Unless CICO can be actually measured, it's simply not an absolute rule in any useful sense.
And, its also pretty insulting to say for 'most of us' CICO is the only way to regulate body weight, when that's not really true. There are many many other ways of losing weight outside of tracking or caring about CICO. Yes, technically, at the end of the day, it must be because of CICO, but like, why should we care enough to track that, when we can't accurately track that?
How does one explain body-builders, who calculate very closely their intake and burning of calories (as well as nutrients)? That's not just "close enough to be useful," is it?
I understand that CICO isn't useful when applied to a social, biological, or psychological situation in which CICO isnt practical or desired or such. It seems to me this discussion is very clearly a case like "of course water is just protons, neutrons, and electrons pushed together with forces in a shape" to explain water's purpose in cellular reproduction. It's technically correct (it's absolutely true that these basic components are what makes it up), but their interactions and forces between them cause emergent properties which need to be dealt with in chemical and biological terms.
This same thing feels like why this discussion always goes badly: of course CICO is real, because 2nd law of thermodynamics is a law for humans too. But of course it's not useful to discuss lifestyles, desires, appetites, and complex activities. If you can spend lots of time tracking it all really well, and not allowing any externalalities to grow, it is useful. But that's not a useful solution applied to healthcare on any sociological scale. And it's not useful when there's no "solution" wanted or needed.
I am not sure honestly how to have any sort of proof about the affect of fatness on other health aspects, or whether there is. Scientifically, it seems almost impossible to me. What does that proof even look like? Major comparisons of health outcomes taking only BMI into account? Finding the bias against fatness separately and taking it into account? But then it will be discovered that health indicators are based on studies of skinny people, so the indicators need re-evaluing, and further down this chain. This cycle is where we are lost and people are talking past one another. Solution to this? More focus on health study funding and diversity in it/remove capitalist incentive structures which always want to change everyone. Then see how the health indicators are looking.
Anyways, this ended up not just being a reply to you, but my take on the whole situation. Sorry for that. The first paragraph (and partially the 2nd) were to you though
I don't understand how the first part disagrees with what I said? Many body builders do estimate it close enough to be useful, yes. But, it's still estimates. We have no way of tracking things like 'basal metabolic rate', and how that might change over time and under different conditions (which, isn't to say it can't be estimated). If you are working out or doing physical labor to a large degree, like body builders and professional athletes do, you can make those basal calories and their fluctuations basically negligible, able to be left as just a line item. When professional bodybuilders are eating 5000 calories a day, yeah, deviations in 'background calories' don't really matter.
I don't want to discount the math pros do as unimpressive, or not useful. But there's a lot of it that is 'napkin math', figured out second or third hand, from the data that is able to be tracked accurately.
but I don't think the 'average person' is expected to work out for 6 hours a day, nor would they likely be capable.
As one tracks one's own calories, and tracks and keep consistent one's activities, it can turn it from estimated to a hard science. That's what I mean. Just that CICO CAN be super accurate, more accurate than most biology we can do in simple "uncertainty" terms. But my overall point is that this is not effective at tackling desires/problems around weight at any larger scale than the "individual in trackable conditions". My only disagreement is linguistic here, I think, and partially a separation of levels of complexity.
I mean that CICO is very precise when isolated, but not precise with variation in a person or groups lives. And CICO is not useful in most of the cases, despite being perfectly scientific at the less complex-scale.
Disagree, that's not what hard science means, nor can it be isolated in such a way for a lot of people.
When I say CICO is the only way to regulate body weight I don't mean calorie tracking. Calorie tracking is absolutely not required, or arguably even helpful, for most people. But you have to do SOMETHING that either changes the amount of calories you consume or how much your body burns. If you don't nothing changes.
That's so vague to be useless though. Many people that struggle to lose weight, the 'problem' isn't the physics of it. It's the mental aspects, of appetite and craving, and the socioeconomic aspects, of time, money, attention, what food is available at what distance, price, and effort.
And, when eating fewer calories can make their bodies go into 'starvation mode', burning fewer baseline calories and making any physical exertion exhausting if not impossible, it is insulting to say 'CICO!'
I agree that it's useless, moralizing advice for people who struggle to lose weight. That doesn't mean the theory itself is unsound, and for people who don't have larger issues regarding their weight but want to regulate a little bit it's basically the only thing they need to be aware of.