Morgen

@thecarpy Yep, natural philosophy was big on consistency, and science thankfully inherited this focus. If you look around, and if all things that you can trace back to their beginning lead back to a creator, it's consistent to extrapolate that all the things you can't trace back that far will eventually also lead to a creator. Pretty reasonable, considering the context.

While it probably won't change the numbers much, it might be worth simplifying the definition of "Christian" to "one who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ", rather than "one who subscribes to the Nicene Creed". It's simpler and avoids the question of how to categorize those who affirm the divinity of Christ, while rejecting the Nicene Creed as theological fanfiction, decided by committee and enforced by violence. That's a can of worms best left unopened.

@RonJohn Also on the spectrum here. It generally doesn't require that much testing because, despite the complexity of the biology involved, testing if a person is on the autism spectrum is pretty straightforward. I'm undiagnosed, but for my daughters (who are also on the spectrum) it took about an hour of direct testing and another of observation. It's easy to spot, once you know what to look for, because it's something you either are or aren't, and the degree to which this affects your day-to-day isn't relevant to the markers that they test for.

@Crowley I've seen all sorts of tricks: smaller dishes, serving food from a counter so you have to get up to refill your plate, spicy over sweet flavoring, etc. As dogma, they're pretty terrible. As filters to help you learn to listen to your body, they're pretty clever - provided you know what they're for so you don't end up resenting them.

@Crowley In this case in particular, learning about the mechanics (as best we understand them) helps lessen the need for willpower - though not remove it altogether, as it helps us make "eat until just full" more pleasant than "eat until your belt is tight".

@Crowley On the other hand, tweaking the environment can't guarantee a particular choice will be made, but it can help tip the balance (theoutline.com/post/2205/…)

@Crowley WRT willpower - it's useful, but rather overrated. Systems are far more useful, as they make it easier to do the right thing (whatever that thing may be). That being said, I knew a guy who stopped drinking by putting a bottle of his favorite whisky in the door of his fridge and telling himself he wouldn't drink it. Most people can't do that.

@Crowley WRT occasionally eating massive amounts: that's well within what the body can handle that, competitive eaters are usually thin like that. I haven't looked into it much, but if you were to have someone track what you ate it would likely average out every couple of days. Losing weight is also a pretty common reaction to stress, similar to how gaining weight is a common reaction to depression.

@Crowley It's much easier for me to listen when my body starts signaling "full" when eating boiled chicken than when eating a juicy steak. This standard will, as you point out, change over time (I have a relative who cuts out all sugar for a month each year to reset their understanding of "sweet", which appears to work for them) - but by that point a person would have probably gotten into the habit of paying attention to their body so it probably wouldn't matter much.

@Crowley WRT "boring food" - This appears to be highly subjective. It's mentioned all over the place as a part of successful weight management, but I can't seem to find any place which explains why. Hazarding a guess, choosing food which is not (or at least less) intrinsically rewarding may cut down on the number of sensations a person attempting to change their eating habits needs to keep track of.

@Crowley I didn't "need" to eat Peeps for any reason other than that they were there, I tend to graze and they happened to be on my dest. My point was that (for a calorie-deprived individual) the brain would manufacture a need strong enough that, eventually, all the willpower in the world won't be able to keep them out of that box.

@Eff Either way, a whole bunch of stuff gets transmitted on those pathways, so it doesn't really help much. It could support the hypothesis that hunger is all in your head, or it could support the hypothesis that hunger is more like pain - you can ignore it for a while, but once you pass a certain point physical changes occur (organ shutdown for pain, metabolic throttling for hunger).

@Eff Sorry for going silent, I just got back from vacation (great time, but the wifi was unreliable). Anyway, that result isn't surprising. The more interesting question is "can we use those differences to understand the weight mechanics better". It's plausible that they result in different people experiencing hunger to different degrees of magnitude, similar to what we see in sensitivity issues WRT other sensations (pain, sound, etc), but that's supposition on my part.

Excellent, missed that reference

Besides, I'd be a hypocrite for holding that against you. My Portuguese is barely above "abysmal"

He's pretty entertaining though :)

I wouldn't recommend their diet, even if you could get it in sufficient amounts, because some of it is really gross.

That really wasn't clear from the context :(

@Eff As far as I know, they never "cheated" on their diet, and only missed exercising when they were physically unable to get out of bed. It was both awe inspiring and heartbreaking. What I was seeing was such a mismatch with what I had been taught about nutrition and diet that I ended up doing a bunch of research to find out what was going on. I ended up finding out that the consensus was coming together that traditional diet and exercise often don't work and can be counterproductive.

@Eff One of the things that really started to shake my own assumptions and start to learn more about it was seeing someone I cared deeply about trying to lose weight by cutting calories and increasing exercise (on the advice of a doctor) - when I knew that level of physical activity was so painful it regularly took 6 Motrin to get through a workout. If anyone should have been able to "mind over matter" their way to thinness, it was them.

@Eff Swinging back to the context of the original question, what started this whole thing is someone asking why the OP couldn't simply mandate their daughter lose weight - which is very symptomatic of the "overweight as character flaw" mindset, and could effect a very real human cost if naively applied - particularly to a teenage girl.

@Eff What I push back against most strongly is the incorrect assumption that it's primarily psychological, because that is one of the fundamental assumptions behind very damaging rhetoric to the effect that people are overweight because of some character flaw. That rhetoric is responsible for doctors withholding pain medication or ignoring symptoms characteristic of chronic conditions like fibromyalgia or MS because they'd go away if the patient "stopped being so lazy and lost some weight".

@Eff I agree that psychology can have an influence on weight, similarly to the effect it has on intelligence. Those who do not think it can be changed don't put in the effort to change it, and by definition cannot succeed. What I'm pointing out is that, even if your head is 100% in the right place, there are physical factors that can make it impossible to lose weight using traditional diets.

@Eff Without the added context that you understood that it was the result of chronic malnourishment and working 14 to 18 hours per day, 6 days out of 7 (firstindustrialrevolution.weebly.com/…), it's hopefully easy to understand how I misread "slam dunk easy" as a overly nostalgic view of health conditions 200 years back.

@Eff Normally, I don't try to put words in people's mouth, this time it was a deliberate attempt to soften the impact. What you actually said was: "The reason why I brought up 200-year-old peoples is because it's a slam dunk easy way to demonstrate that there is a way to stay non-overweight. Simply eat the diet they had, that's it, you're basically guaranteed to not be overweight."

@AgustínLado Side note 2: I'm starting to regret using the term "default weight" as a shorthand for the more verbose explanation that "as body metabolism changes, despite fluctuating, average weight tends to go up or down to match". It's my term and it's failing its purpose. In my defense, it does help mitigate character limits in posts, but it's causing confusion more often than being helpful.

@AgustínLado A slightly better example is the advice here (provided you don't focus on the calorie numbers and instead on the very good advice to "Eat just enough so you're not hungry", which is easier to do with somewhat boring food): prevention.com/weight-loss/a20475557/…

@AgustínLado Side note to avoid confusion: the Livestrong article is giving outdated advice in terms of effective strategies for losing weight, I cited it primarily to show that the metabolic fallout of traditional dieting advice is both well known and has been well known for quite some time (they quote a 2010 review study describing the phenomenon).

@AgustínLado Or their success and failure are actually related to a hidden confounding factor we don't understand yet. All we can really say is that, for most people, "mind over matter" doesn't work, and for many people "eat healthy, but boring, food and listen to when your body says 'stop'" is a successful weight management strategy.

@AgustínLado The question of if a particular person can manage to lose weight is less certain. It's plausible that, for some people, the target caloric range between "low enough to lose weight" and "too low, bad stuff happens" is super broad so traditional diets appear to work for them. On the other hand, the target range could be so narrow as to be impossible to stay within without dedicating all of their time and efforts to managing, and is impractical.

@AgustínLado It's an absurdly powerful behavioral motivator. Please do keep in mind that this is the same physical need which has driven people in survival situations to attempt to eat leather, and in some cases resort to cannibalism. This isn't a "put up or shut up" craving.

@AgustínLado While there are some psychological barriers to overcome, as long as they don't pass the caloric thresholds which trigger metabolic slowdown or worse the starvation response, they're manageable for most people who aren't battling other issues like excessive stress or depression. Once you pass those thresholds, those aren't psychological cravings, they're physical manifestations of hunger and I'd ballpark upwards of 99% of people aren't capable of resisting.

@AgustínLado These adjustments are made to keep you within a certain range of a particular weight, what that weight is varies by person based on genetic factors and life experiences. It took quite a bit of work to get my default weight up to 180 lbs, for most of my teen years I was flirting with being dangerously underweight for my height. That experience is somewhat exceptional, most people have issues making it go the other way and psychological cravings have very little to do with it

@AgustínLado For example, calories burned isn't just a factor of how much you exercise, if you've cut calories too much your body adjusts how many calories it burns based on how much you eat (livestrong.com/article/…).

@AgustínLado What I described only boils down to psychological needs if your understanding of weight management is based on a paradigm of "mind over matter" and "overweight as a character flaw". The science doesn't bear out that paradigm.

@Eff It's a slam-dunk, but in the wrong net. 200 years ago the struggle wasn't to keep weight on - it was to not starve. For context, from 1800 to 1850 the average life expectance dropped from 56 to 43 years (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…), and things were good in the USA. Keeping away from sugar helps an number of health outcomes, but please don't portray 200 years ago as any sort of Health Utopia.

@Eff I'd assumed you'd missed that because I couldn't see any other reason why you'd compare weight statistics now with weight statistics from 200 years ago. The conditions are so very different that, aside from describing long term trends, the comparison isn't meaningful in terms of deriving weight management solutions.

@Eff I've tried to be very clear that it's a complicated system and while we know what doesn't work and some things that do work much of the time (or at least work better), weight management is by no means a solved problem. That's without getting into things like the effect of depression and other chronic conditions on weight management. I've apparently failed at conveying that appropriately, and I am very sorry for this miscommunication.

@Eff Perhaps "invariably" was the wrong word, however it's undeniable that traditional diets lead to long term weight gain for everyone but a small enough population that rounding is a larger source of variance. "we don't yet have a consistent, universal, and effective path to being thin" is the truth because "eat X not Y" doesn't work for everyone, "cut X calories" doesn't work for everyone, and what I've described as the current best practices for weight management doesn't work for everyone.

@Crowley Traditional diets focus on powering though excessive cuts to calories, which triggers the body's response to starvation. Eating way more calories than your body is willing to accept triggers nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, etc. The key isn't willpower, the key is listening to your body and understanding the mechanics so you don't trigger these excessive responses.

@Crowley It makes it easier to pay attention to the signals your body is giving about being full if the other incentives to continue to eat are removed. Essentially, each person has a range of caloric intake that's healthy for them, a fairly small range at the bottom of that healthy range which drives safe and maintainable weight loss, and a fairly small range at the top of that healthy range which drives safe and maintainable weight gain.

@Crowley The second factor is on that @Eff misses as well: food has been commercialized and has been designed to be intrinsically rewarding to eat. Weight comparisons to 200 years ago aren't valid because the incentives to eat are much different than they were even 100 years ago. This is one of the reasons that the current weight loss advice includes eating relatively boring foods.

@Crowley On the whole you're correct about hunger being driven by what the body needs. The situation is complicated by two factors. The first is that the body doesn't always know what it needs. Traditional diets convince the body that it's in a famine, so it reacts in ways that work against weight targets because it's preparing you to survive long term lack of food.

@Crowley That's the trick though - the background processes of the brain drive those rewards, and adjust them accordingly. I can't sit down and demolish twelve boxes of Peeps any more - not because I don't want to, but simply because they don't taste as good as they used to. My body has adjusted the reward schedule for Peeps because I don't need as many calories as I did when I was swimming a couple of hours a day as I was at the time.

@Eff Granted, this is our current understanding and our bodies are incredibly complex and dynamic systems, so a better way may be out there waiting to be discovered. We have, however, moved past the simplistic idea that simply cutting calories is sufficient to drive long term weight goals.

@Eff The links describe our current understanding of how to influence weight - eat healthy but relatively boring food to cut down on the extra signals that keep a person eating past the point of biological need, and stop when you are full. Doing that fools your body into thinking it doesn't need to pack on the extra weight in a similar fashion that traditional dieting fools the body into thinking it's in a famine and needs to save what it can as fat.

@Eff Hunger and thirst are (behind the need for air) about the strongest biological impulses we have, and for good reason. Your body is a dynamic system, and your conscious desires only run a very small part of it - which is good, we're so complex that managing our autonomous systems would be unmanageable if we had to pay attention to them all. These systems are geared towards keeping us alive - breathing, sleeping, and (unsurprisingly) not starving to death.

@Eff The majority of people need to address the underlying cause to have any reasonable chance of long term success. Which leads to the second thing you're misunderstanding: the natural processes of your body are not a character flaw.