Why YSK: many countries have issues with weight, such as mine with 74% of US adults being overweight or obese. The global weight loss industry is over $200 billion yearly, with many influencers, pills, and surgeries promising quick results with little effort. These often come with side effects, or don’t work long term.
Studies suggest filling yourself with foods low in caloric density and high in fiber, like fruits and vegetables, can help reach and maintain a healthy weight. It’s good to have these foods available in our living spaces to make the choice easy. Your taste buds will likely adapt to love them if you’re not there yet.
Thanks for saying this. I think the idea that it is just willpower causes so much unnecessary suffering. As someone suffering from an eating disorder and thyroid disease, I was getting a bit down reading all the “it’s just calories in vs calories out” remarks. It is so much more complicated than that.
For many, many folk, it is simply cal in vs out.
If you’ve some condition that affects metabolism, then yes, that sort of advice is not the best.
It’s calorie in/out in the thermodynamics sense, but humans are far too complicated to meaningfully model as a thermodynamic system.
Just doing calorie in/out dieting really doesn’t work for most people. That’s why you need to combine it with behavioral changes, strategies to change habits and attitudes towards food, which usually also involves changing what you eat and when so the downsides of eating less are less bothersome.
I think for most people it is not the best advice. In most cases, there are many other factors at play than just willpower and “calories in vs calories out”. Obesity should be viewed and treated more like a disease, because it is. If you are interested, I can link you some interesting papers on this.