Yep we all eat too much. I started counting calories and found out that I was eating twice as much as I should have. It’s not obvious and every place serves big portions.
I just used an online calculator. It said something like 1500 kcal a day for my activity level to maintain weight.
I don’t really count calories, but I do look to get a general idea of what a meal or a snack is. Sometimes I’m way over, sometimes I’m way under, it’s all about balance and being in the ballpark.
I’ve been counting calories for the last few months, and that was my big realization as well. I could have easily put down a single meal at a restaurant which is my entire (or more) daily intake now.
I’m counting calories too, it’s not even the amount but it’s that some foods are total calorie bombs. You can pretty easily ingest a day’s worth of calories in a single meal at the restaurant without really feeling like you overate, but if I pay attention and select my foods properly I can feel like I ate plenty and be under 1500cal a day.
I find the premade mixes from Birdseye (sold basically everywhere that has frozen food) to be a pretty good lazy way to get a big meal. Usually a decent mix of meat, veggies, and grain, but the whole bag (3 servings) is only like 600-900 kcal. Sometimes it feels like an obscene amount of food for the calorie count.
It’s not just that we eat “too much” but also that we’re eating too much non-nutritive foods. The United States has entirely too many so-called “food deserts” where people are unable to purchase healthy foods
I work on OpenFoodFacts, and the big issue is simply the amount of saturated fats and refined sugars there are in a lot of processed foods.
Like, sure, people have to be held personally responsible to some extent, but it should also be on the government to properly regulate how foods are advertised. I really appreciate the Nutriscore system that's being pushed for in Europe despite the flaws it has, and here in Canada they've been making some changes in how certain products are shown on shelves such as requiring labeling if they're high in sugar or fats and changing the previous confusing labels for energy drinks with a more easy-to-read Supplemental Food Facts label.
End of the day though, if something is still being labelled as being "healthy" when it really isn't, that's all it takes to fool the average consumer unfortunately. Stuff like Lucky Charms shouldn't be advertised to kids as "part of a complete breakfast", and it's absurd that a lot of "healthier" alternatives to certain foods are being advertised that way despite only being barely any better than the original product, like turkey bacon or veggie straws.
My brother-in-law eats a huge bowl of cold cereal every morning with skim milk… I drink a coffee with heavy cream or half and half and don’t eat breakfast. He’s a bigger guy that can’t figure out how to lose weight and I’m not anymore.
Shitty cereal is my weakness, but even then you can fit it into an otherwise healthy diet as a treat every now and then. I just buy the tiny box once a month and only have a few bowls. Working on a box of fruity pebbles right now, lol.
My son has celiac. Fruity pebbles is one of the few he can safely have. I made the mistake of reading into the food coloring they use I guess there’s some unconfirmed links to ADD lol. FML we can’t win.
To be fair I can’t figure out what to have for breakfast. I have issues with low blood sugar recently so I’ve been having… Lucky Charms :/. I just need to cut calories elsewhere I guess
The problem could be how fast you digest your food. As high as fat is in calories, it also digests much slower than sugar. So low fat might actually worse for you in a lot of cases.
Eggs are great. Protein is also very slow to digest. Eggs are mostly protein and fat, and the fat is largely good fats. Eggs also take well to being mixed with other foods. Once you get sick of basic eggs, like fried eggs and scrambled eggs, then you can sprinkle a little bit of cheese on it and it’s a completely different flavor. Full fat cheese please, none of that 2% bullshit. Add some bread and you have an egg and cheese sandwich, toast and eggs, toad in the hole, or basic French toast.
I have spent most of my life struggling with low blood sugar issues. It is not only difficult to live with, but it is impossible to find real advice on how to deal with it. Most doctors are arrogant pricks that tell you just to eat less. Sure, I’ll just go on a diet again and lose consciousness on the way home from work again, great fucking advice.
If it is really negatively affecting your health, you might also look at semaglutide. It works by making you digest slower. That has been a game changer for me. Being able to eat like a normal person is freeing… I actually worked through lunch this weekend. Completely forgot to eat because I was doing something really interesting. If you don’t understand how big a deal that is, then you just need to work on eating better foods, you don’t need the semaglutide. If that sounds like a fantasy thing that You would never f****** dare, then it might be something to look into.
Oats cooked in full fat non-homogenized milk, toss an egg or two in near the end and stir well. Top with ripe bananas or blueberries. Stir in some honey, but not the pasteurized shit and avoid spring variants.
Edit: this (and variants) was my breakfast for a year at the age of 35 and I went from 90kg to 75. No lunch, only dinner around 6PM, only coffee in between. Admittedly I also biked 20-40km a day and did some dumbbell and calisthenics exercises.
Yeah I had a seizure in early January and the culprit seemed to be low blood sugar. When I came to, they took a blood glucose reading and it was 50. I suspect some medicines I was taking at the time were artificially reducing my blood sugar without me realizing it.
So these days, I would never dare it yeah haha. Isn’t protein something I want to avoid though, since it doesn’t really add to my blood sugar and just makes me feel full? I’m not following I guess.
There may be a lot of reasons that you should avoid protein, but as a general rule of dieting, protein is harder to digest than carbs, so it slows your digestion down, and it has less calories than fat. The idea is to dispense the calories as measured and slow as possible, while still having enough to feel energetic.
Sort of, but carbs are problematic.so its not cut and dried. Also, not all your calories have to come from carbs. For instance, Keto diets get rid of most, if not all, carbs from your diet. I suspect that a keto diet would probably be ideal for me considering how badly my body handles carbs, but I just don’t have the willpower, money, or time to do a keto diet.
I’m no dietitian or doctor, so I can’t actually give you advice on your diet directly. I get on here to rant because I’m sick of being sold bad information and bad foods just to increase corporate profits, and then having so called professionals treat me like it’s my fault that their continued bad advice makes everything worse for me.
The simple fact is that some people’s bodies are different, and some of us really need fat in our diets.
From what you have said, it really seems like you need to find a proper nutritionist. Not someone trying to sell you a specific diet, or supplement, but someone who can look through your medical history, and help you figure out something that will work for you.
I am willing to bet that unless you have allergies, or other medical issues that preclude them, that eggs will be one of the top things on their food recommendations.
Overnight oats with protein powder and fruit, Chia pudding with fruit and Greek yogurt, eggs and whole wheat toast with guacamole or avocado, protein pancakes with fruit and Greek yogurt,
Something high in protein and with low glycemic index carbs.
You want something that will digest over a long time and release sugars and nutrients into the blood steadily, not something high in refined highly available sugars which hit the bloodstream all at once and spike blood sugar, then when it’s all used up your blood sugar dips back down sharply.
Mmmm. Scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast with real fruit jam, and then fruit or Greek yogurt should be good too then right? Because that actually sounds delicious.
Lobbyists have even polluted the ingredient label on the back. Now they can list a brand name as an ingredient, then list the ingredients of that. This lets them disguise the most prevalent ingredients if they’re also part of the brand.
Water, oil, sugar, xantham gum, Bob’s secret spice (enough sugar so that if the label were truthful, sugar would be the second ingredient instead of the third, cinnamon, nutmeg).
I never used the ingredient list to determine sugar content, since there also is a table on the back with g sugar / 100 g product. Is that not printed on the products package where you live?
I keep getting into it with people I mostly agree with. Yes, it’s fucked up that we add HFCS to everything and that corporations have weaponized addiction, but we can fight back.
Yep, way to many people over eat, and it has nothing to do with what’s in the food, people are just super seditaty these days and eat constantly.
Clicking the downvote button doesn’t magically make me wrong. There is a reason that you can eat straight Twinkies for a month and watch the calories and still lose weight. You’re not smarter than physics.
That’s part of it but the deeper question is why are people more sedentary? Why do people eat more often?
What is it about our society that promotes eating more processed foods?
My feelings are that food for many people is a sedative for a stressful life. Sugar is a great drug to make you feel good temporarily.
Then there is very little quality education around good nutrition and cooking in the US. Most people just take what the learned from their parents and go with it. And if their parents weren’t food smart then they probably will not be either.
there is a lot more to the obesity epidemic than just “stop eating so much”
There really isn’t though, it’s not rocket science. People just eat to damn much. Even the EU is having issues with it now. The UK is basically our fat neighbor at this point.
Bitching about down votes doesn’t magically make you right. You’re being downvoted because what you said is idiotic.
It has a lot to do with what’s in the food. Sure, if you eat nothing but 1500 calories of Twinkies every day, when you were eating 3000 balanced calories, you’ll lose weight.
That is about 12 Twinkies. Not even an entire box of Twinkies. And that’s all you get to eat in a day.
It would be much easier to reduce calories if half of them were from vegetables and the other half from meat. Feeling hungry has a lot to do with why diets fail. You can’t just apply physics to the human body and expect emotional and hormonal changes not to have an impact on the choices that human makes.
Naa I’m being down voted because people want the easy way out, all the time. You’re the same type that runs with the Healthy at any size. The same groups that promote that sudo science bullshit. No where did I say it was healthy to eat Twinkies and lose weight, but acting like people are fat because of the food that’s offered is a fucking cop out.
Eating ultra processed foods are not only unhealthy, they also cause you to eat more than you would if you were eating exactly the same thing with real food.
An argument you’ll note that is not only consistent with my guest comment, but actually argues for people doing more work than they’re likely doing to lose weight.
Subjects were instructed to consume as much or as little as desired.
The study also lasted 2 weeks and had less than 40 people in it. This is a bullshit study, we know people are going to eat ultra processed foods because it tastes good. Hell I’m guilty of it even, I will eat an entire pizza on my own if I don’t stop myself. This study should say, people lack will power to not eat free fast food… it’s a complete nothing burger of a study.
Buddy either you have hard data to back your claim or you don’t. You’re saying that diet has less impact on weight than exercise and that’s literally false. It’s the most wrong thing you could say and still sound like you’re speaking English.
Where the fuck did I say that? I’ve literally said multiple times in this post that CICO is not rocket science. The fuck are you talking about? Go back and read what I’ve stated. No where did I say diet isn’t more effective. I’ve literally states the opposite, people eat to much. Period. Even your own study shows that… people enjoy eating big macs more than healthy food…aka water is wet.
would be much easier to reduce calories if half of them were from vegetables and the other half from meat.
you’re saying like eating twinkies is the only option. Veggies and meat are in every market. Are people generally this stupid that they think they have to only eat junk food?
I think SupraMario has a good point - people (over)eat and they sit all day, every day. Personally, I eat a shit ton - but I also burn a shit ton, about 900 calories extra daily through exercise. If i didn’t exercise I would probably overeat, too. We need to get people off their asses.
73% of all of the food sold in the US is considered ultra processed, so no it’s not just Twinkies, but at this point unless you’re only buying neat and vegetables, you’re buying something that is lower in nutrients and bound to make you feel more hungry than you would if you ate something nearly identical that you made yourself.
Getting up and moving is great, I’m not discounting exercise. You do not lose weight by exercising. You lose weight through diet control.
You do not lose weight by exercising. You lose weight through diet control.
you lose weight by CICO. You either restrict calories in, or increase calories out, it does not matter.
73% of all of the food sold in the US is considered ultra processed, so no it’s not just Twinkies, but at this point unless you’re only buying neat and vegetables, you’re buying something that is lower in nutrients and bound to make you feel more hungry than you would if you ate something nearly identical that you made yourself.
agreed. But it’s not too difficult - buy some zuchinni, potatoes, tomatoes, onion, garlic, eggplant - dice it up, put in a pan, salt, pepper, nutmeg, together with whole, skin on chicken, roast for 45 min and you have a delicious nutricious meal. It’s literally 15 minutes of prep and it feeds a whole family at once. Everyone can do it. There’s no need to buy any processed food.
See my first comment, applying physics to the human body and ignoring the hormonal and psychological impacts is going to lead to failure. It is much more like treating addiction than anything else.
Yeaaaah you’re probably getting into it cause your points don’t really have much merit and that can be frustrating. Like a simple look at when the obesity epidemic took off should have saved me from having to write this comment.
I’ve been about 160 lbs my entire adult life, last year I was getting close to 200 lbs and when my clothes stopped fitting I realized I needed to acknowledge my dietary choices. I’m not 25 or even 35 anymore so I had to figure things out and did some research on calorie management. I still eat pizza, burgers, drink beer, drink soda and enjoy candy. I’m just mindful of my calorie budget +/- 200.
This is my weight in kilos after peaking around 90 kgs last year I stopped recording my weight for a few months. Then I stuck to my “diet” and it wasn’t crazy hard to manage. I’m not an athlete, in fact, I live a pretty sedentary life. These results are from saying no to snacks, avoiding potato chips, and grabbing two pieces of pizza and freezing the rest instead of eating the entire pie.
That’s great and I applaud you, seriously. But we mercilessly bullied fat people in the 80s, 90s, 00s and yet obesity skyrocketed. And you should probably consider what health (note not healthy) at every weight (HAES) actually is before dismissing it. Like we should encourage people to be healthy even if they’re overweight. This is like addiction, we’re not going to moral police our way out of this health issue.
My wife and I share an entrée and an appetizer here in the US because there’s no way anyone is meant to eat our portion sizes. We tip well to not look cheap, but Jesus Christ I don’t need a full rack of ribs and 5 lbs of french fries.
For me? Yes. At least I gain too much weight. I generally do one or two and still get told I’m overweight by my doctor, despite one of those “meals” being like a salad or a couple of bananas, despite also exercising. Always a bit hungry but still told to lose weight.
It’s really frustrating, in my country not only are we the most obese in the region, we’re also the most diabetic. A huge double whammy that’s burdening the healthcare system
It’s hard to find “fit” people anymore. Walking around some grocery stores is mind blowing. I honestly feel bad for people. The “food” we have is shit and life is getting busier and busier.
Go into the produce isle for once, veggies are cheap…fish and chicken is cheap. A single trip to McDonald’s for 2 is like $25 or more now. You can get like 6 or 7 whole chicken breasts for that price and have money for potatoes and fresh veggies.
This is a big deal people often don’t realize. Even something as simple as an alfredo pasta will have way too much butter in it when you order it at a restaurant. (Why do you think it tastes so good?) An entire stick of butter for a single serving is quite common.
Not only is cooking for yourself significantly cheaper than ordering food, you are also significantly more aware of the calories you are putting into the food.
Even something as simple as an alfredo pasta will have way too much butter in it when you order it at a restaurant.
Hell no. It will have too little and probably doesn’t contain proper parmesan, either. Also it’s not actually simple, it’s minimalist, but hard to actually get right – Italian cuisine in a nutshell. I almost wanted to say “and be extended by starch slurry” but then realised that pasta water vs. starch isn’t really something one should complain about, if anything that’s a fault of sub-par noodles… anyway:
The butter unhealthy / saturated fat unhealthy thing is due to plant fat manufacturers trying to sell hardened fats as healthy giving us the wonders of trans fats, flanked by the sugar industry’s “fat makes fat”. While I’m at it the cholesterol stuff is the equivalent of “dead firefighters found at conflagration site, thus, abolish the fire department”. Not to mention that dietary cholesterol has no correlation to blood cholesterol. And how could I forget the tobacco industry which was very successful in blaming the cardiac arrest epidemic on anything but smoking by concern trolling the scientific process.
There’s processed foods which are perfectly fine but as an experiment try avoiding anything that has been invented in the last 100 years or so for a while and observe the difference. There’s certainly restaurants around which cook like that but it’s not going to be the ones people with two jobs eat at.
Oh and I don’t think the science is completely in yet but it seems that the “gluten intolerance” epidemic is due to increased use of glyphosate directly before harvest to make wheat grow faster: It’s not the gluten but some people’s stomach just don’t take the residue as well as others. So YMMV on being able to get proper ingredients for that experiment.
Which is why all known “advanced” civilisations (scare quotes for lack of better term) have formed around some kind of grain. Wheat in Egypt spreading to Europe, rice in Asia, Maize in the Americas: All basically don’t spoil when stored properly, because dry they can be transported well, and they’re also all nicely divisible. Ask the Irish whether the English wanted them to pay taxes in grain or potatoes.
Domestically produced crops tend to be much cheaper. Think corn in the US. The stuff is so cheap they even turn much of it into sugar for foods and ethanol for cars.
Beyond the time/energy cost, you’re comparing two different things: cooking healthy food from scratch vs. buying boxed ‘unhealthy’ food. Buying boxed ‘healthy’ food is more expensive than buying boxed ‘unhealthy’ food, and cooking ‘unhealthy’ food is cheaper than cooking ‘healthy’ food.
For example: I could make a huge mess of white rice and oil very cheaply and quickly. Every other ingredient I add will raise the cost and time investment. People say, “oh, just throw in some eggs/grilled chicken breast/fresh veggies and you have a cheap healthy meal!” but it’s still a lot more expensive to do that (in both money and time) than to just make rice.
I spend about $12/day on ingredients, which is about the cost of a single meal at McDonald’s which is far less healthy. I don’t think that actually stands up when you look at the prices of cheap food (chicken, rice, beans, other legumes, potatoes) plus the costs of sides (fruits, vegetables).
I imagine it would be pretty easy to take the list of what people buy/eat and their health issues and see clearly what foods are causing what health problems.
I bet the average cashier would even be able to point out the worst products.
But never, ever, will that happen. Grocery store is full of dead animals and animal proteins and cancer look to go hand in hand. The other big one is sugar. People are hooked on it like cocaine.
Isn't that mainly red meats that appear to have a relation to cancer? Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe poultry is fine and that seafood has even been shown to possibly prevent certain cancers.
red meat, any charred meat, chicken is reported back and forth often depending on things like who owns the media outlet or who funded the report. Fish is all over, its too broad a net to cast. Different types of fish from different parts of the world, Trillions of them are eaten every year.
With capitalism and the government entangled in the industry. I know they use propaganda to enhance their markets. My personal outlook on it is that the stance that cancer and animal consumption has solid findings. Our government (US) actively promotes the industry and subsidizes it with billions of $$$. Then on the cdc page they list red meat as a cancer causing carcinogen. In America, profits are #1. Cancer, heart disease, and diabetes are big money makers for pharmaceutical companies. JBS is a huge company. Owners are convicted criminals for bribing politicians. They raise animals in africa and california and then ship them to china. None of this has any concern about our health. For me, I have seen and read enough to make the decision to stay away from it. Anything to keep me out of the US healthcare system.
I imagine it would be pretty easy to take the list of what people buy/eat and their health issues and see clearly what foods are causing what health problems.
True, but it entirely ignores what’s driving them to buy those things. For example, if you’re a single parent working two jobs, when you get home do you want to start cooking a meal, or just put a Stouffer’s in the microwave and veg out?
Maybe but that entirely ignores that capitalism has been marketing to them with commercials and coupon clubs for decades and that these products advertise themselves as things they are not because the government is in cahoots with the ag industry and happily deregulates so JBS can sell more meat to chinas growing demand. How can we over look this? How about the got milk campaign? sugar drink advertised as health food by the government for decades 67% of people are allergic to. More context there is that one particularly marginalized group of americans is 3-4x as likely to be allergic, so it isn’t not a racial issue also.
I cook rice in a rice maker, and beans in a crock pot. It really doesn’t get tougher. Like at some point it has to get put on a plate or in a bowl and then some would have to use tools like forks and spoons to get it into their mouths. Then there are the dishes, oh man who wants to wash dishes, think of all that time saved. /s
It’s not just any regular sugar, it’s that high fructose corn syrup that’s the killer. Consuming a bit of sugar here and there isn’t that bad, but consuming something that is foreign to the body and accumulates in the liver is a whole new level of fucked up.
It’s not really foreign many fruits have an even worse fructose/glucose ratio than HFCS.
The thing about fructose is that unlike glucose the body can’t burn it (pretty much) as-is, it first has to be processed by the liver, and that via turning it into fat. Evolutionarily that wasn’t an issue: Fruit appears in summer, exactly the time when you want to get fat to then have some storage for the winter, what the system isn’t made for is consuming the stuff all the time.
That is, HFCS in winter should be just as suspect to you as strawberries in winter.
True. And lot of these fruits come with fibers, which helps in slowing down the absorption of the sugars. That’s why I barely eat grapes and any fruit that is low on fiber, nor drink any juice, period. You’re right, though.
While high fructose corn syrup isn’t great for you, it’s clearly not the problem. The US domestic use of HFCS peaked in the 90s, yet obesity has continued to skyrocket.
The UK also has a obesity epidemic…and so does the entire EU basically… it’s not what we eat, it’s how much we eat and how little people are moving these days.
That really depends on where you live. I know when I go to visit my parents I’m always very impressed by the older people (65+) that I see on their daily walks. They are definitely fit. It’s the same when I go to the supermarkets in that area, I see a lot of fit, healthy people of all ages. Even the people working the register are in good shape.
Here we go again, giving no accountability. Yes, healthy food is more expensive, but that doesn’t mean fat people didn’t eat themselves fat.
The Internet will bend over backwards to ignore the algebra of calories. Base metabolic rates are basically identical between all humans. The lie of a “fast metabolism” is not why some people are skinny.
People are fat because they consume more calories than they burn. Blaming someone else doesn’t fix it.
“Oh gosh, I don’t drink soda and rarely eat treats, why am I still fat?” Because you eat too much for your daily expenditure.
You’re speaking from your very tiny corner of the world. I understand that there are people who fall under whatever you said, but a big chunk just don’t have the time to give a single fuck about how healthy their food is, or they can’t afford it money and time wise. Some people do multiple jobs and have kids. I get what you mean, though.
Yes, but not thinking about your food choices is the problem. If I get fast food, I don’t get the double quarter pounder, large fries, and a drink. I get a single cheeseburger and an iced coffee with only cream. People act like being hungry is torture, but if you meet your caloric needs, that should be enough.
Personally, I want to get drunk every day and all the time. My brain screams at me to go buy booze. I chose not to drink today.
I get what youre saying, but people are fatter in America than their counterparts in European countries. Is it more realistic to suppose we as humans are different across the pond, or is the lifestyle enforced and the additives allowed within the food Americans eat contributing to the difference?
I think diet is a part of it, but car culture and fast food is the biggest difference. Many developed European countries still rank much higher than the US in steps taken per day. Plus, fast food is usually a treat and not the default with a drive thru. It is back to the algebra of calories in the end.
This would make sense… If it was exactly the same everywhere with a similar level of convenience.
But it’s not, America is much much worse than Europe on this, and rich countries in Europe don’t exactly have less convenience than the US. How else would you explain it other than a systemic difference? American brains are not fundamentally different to European ones.
As an Europan I can tell you, that the food in de US often tasted sweet to me. It’s like people in the US lost their taste buds for bitter and sour. There is no need to add sugar to every dish, especially bread. The other thing was the amount of fat in nearly everything. Salad? With a creamy sauce or tons of oil. Of course you have to add 400g meat AND a high calories cheese to it. Served with some sweet bread and it’s basically a burger in disguise. We were told that California was the healthy and rich state. If that was the healthy food, I’m starting to believe all those images on social media of fat dripping dishes.
In the end we cooked ourselves most of the time and payed the horrific price.
Try eating it for a few months and I bet you will see that people acclimate. Just like if you cut out salt suddenly processed shit tasted way too salty. Hell, I just had a peanut butter cup, first candy in weeks and it was like hyper sugar. Yuck.
A buddy of mine spends time in an easy Asian country where even desert is barely sweet and he noticed the same coming back to the states.
See, food companies figured out they could make more money selling food with cheap HFCS because it “tastes better”. It’s cheaper than sugar because we grow boat tons of corn + govt subsidies. It isn’t banned because corruption and regulatory capture that is ubiquitous in the US.
I think diet is a part of it, but car culture and fast food is the biggest difference. Many developed European countries still rank much higher than the US in steps taken per day. Plus, fast food is usually a treat and not the default with a drive thru. It is back to the algebra of calories in the end.
In short, some Europeans live on easy mode when it comes to weight and fitness. Their portions are probably smaller, fast food less common. There are better social safety nets reducing sources of stress.
Perhaps the food industry hasn’t achieved the level of regulatory capture as in the US and so sucrose / HFCS isn’t added to things as much (idk I am guessing)?
Yeah it’s all about the calories in vs out but there are clearly systemic issues that, once fixed, would help us greatly in the US.
Car culture is not quite accurate. It is more like, “the entire mode of existence of anything outside of downtown areas is designed around cars and is so ingrained in laws, infrastructure, city planning, etc. that it will take many decades of committed, relentless, focused, unopposed effort to undo.”
I agree with all your points, but I think knowing that you don’t use your full 2,000’ish calories a day should be factored into what you choose to eat. Personally whenever I move, I always look for the most walkable neighborhoods so I can at least try to live a more passively active lifestyle.
I understand that this is a privilege, but I also eat one cheeseburger and maybe a six piece chicken nugget when I go to McDonald’s. I don’t need fries or a soda, because I don’t burn enough calories to justify them.
I generally agree with you but I don’t think you are taking into account individual nutrition. For a fat person to lose weight they need to eat less. When this happens your body literally screams at you not to. This doesn’t end when you are no longer fat. It is a constant battle and your body is constantly trying to reach the fat state again. Unfortunately when you restrict your diet to lose weight, or keep it off, this itself can cause deficiencies and malnourishment.
This is very much a systemic issue but it is also tied into culture and personal responsibility. Unfortunately it is very complicated and not the same for everyone.
But losing it is hard and the battle to maintain a lower weight is a bitch and a half.
If it were easy, everyone would do it.
Not all of us are equipped with unassailable willpower (I think that’s part of the executive function of the brain). Additionally, many people maladaptively cope with stress, trauma, boredom, lack of dopamine, etc., by eating. Others have mentioned factors that discourage cooking at home.
I think any dismissive, simplistic, judgemental take on weight loss is worth the toilet paper I just flushed. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t help anyone who needs help.
About all it does is make the preachy people feel superior to those who they’re preaching to … while making the overweight people feel shame, usually a counterproductive emotion. If shame effectively motivated people to lose weight, few would be overweight because there’s been plenty of fat shaming over the years.
People are individually responsible. But people are also responsible for finances. Telling someone they should manage their money better, get a better job, and spend less is equally tone deaf as much weight loss “advice”.
Better to understand the whole picture and figure out what we can do to systemically and individually set people up for success rather than denigrating them for personal and systemic issues.
Correct, which isn’t an excuse to eat your way to an early grave. We can change them, but we live in the conditions we have while working for the ones we want.
Exactly so we should be personally accountable to ourselves and externally sympathetic as well as follow known best practices like being encouraging to fat people seeking weight loss rather than encouraging fat people to associate their weight with shame in their body.
I keep myself skinny and muscular. But I’m sympathetic to people who fail to do so. I’d much rather be an annoying prophet of cycling and home cooked vegetarian meals than the bitch who tells people to feel bad about their body. Their bodies are great, they just aren’t in the best condition at the moment. People tend not to take care of things they have but are ashamed of, even if they’d be proud of it were it better cared for.
Something I haven’t seen other commenters bring up that can have a huge impact, is the overall lifestyles people are living.
The unhealthiest years of my life were when I was working 2 jobs and struggling to keep a roof over mine and my 3 kids heads. Stress and depression were huge problems and money was tight, so sometimes the little bit of dopamine or serotonin from eating a “treat” were the highlights of the day. Add to that, the guilt of not being around to cook regular meals for my kids lead to 1) making large amounts of food on my one day off that could be eaten as leftovers throughout the week or 2) easy convenience foods (frozen pizzas, boxed Mac and cheese, etc) that the kids could make when I wasn’t around.
Fast forward many years - my kids are adults taking care of themselves and I’m down to 1 good job that offers financial stability. My diet and health have completely changed. I actually have the time and energy to cook and plan better.
I’m not saying this to shift blame or responsibility, but to bring a different experience. When I hear (hopefully well meaning) people suggest “just cook healthier meals” it strikes me about the same as “stop eating avocado toast and you could afford a house.”
Yep. My boomer dad: “When I was a kid, we walked everywhere! Nobody walks anymore!” Also my dad: “I’m afraid to drive into Portland because my truck might get stolen.”
Well said, that’s what we call canard advice. Unhelpful advice that’s obvious to everyone and does no fucking good to say whatsoever. You can cook more when your primary financial needs are met, so you can just work 40 hours in a week. That and the RTO mandates going around are robbing people of a significant chunk of time yet again ontop of overemployment. When you have to work a 10 hour day and commute an hour plus each direction, then come home and “cook” something, it usually translates to heating up frozen shit and then wishing you weren’t miserable.
Lack of free time to cook healthy food with a busier and more expensive life with salary raises that don’t keep up with inflation or layoffs for many people definitely doesn’t help. Healthy food ends up costing twice as much, if not more than unhealthy food. It’s a multi-faceted problem and should be treated as such.
I don’t think healthy food is necessarily more expensive, at least not if you know what you’re doing. My personal experience is actually the opposite.
The problem, as you mentioned is the time, and the emotional and physical labor of figuring out something the whole family will want to eat and cooking it. Those things are all expenditures in their own ways, but not financial.
Ingredients: rice, black beans, eggs, onion, garlic.
The night before, let the beans soak. Before cooking, change the water on the beans. Heat until boiling, change the water again, add salt and let the beans boil slowly for 1.5-3h.
Slice the onion and garlic in small chunks. Fry in a shallow pot, in just a bit of olive oil. Add some oregano or whatever spices you enjoy. When it is fried to your taste, add the rice. Mix it for a bit, and then add 2.5 cups of water for each cup of rice.
Let it boil until the water doesn’t cover the rice, then turn the heat down until it’s just evaporating water (I like my rice dry). Meanwhile, fry a couple eggs, use a strainer to get the beans out, and add everything to the rice (or you can serve the eggs on the plate).
• 1kg of rice: 2€ • 1kg black beans: 4€ • A carton of eggs: 2.5€
YMMV but this is tasty and pretty inexpensive, if you don’t count the 2h of boiling beans, but I prefer them on the soft side :P
You’re not feeding 4 people on a red baron pizza and no one is getting fat from sharing one with 4 people. Fast food is expensive, and so is pre packaged meals. To many people get home from work and just eat shit instead of learning to cook.
Steamed veggies are cheap, rice is cheap, beans are cheap, grab some seasoning and a pack of chicken breasts and you can eat good for a few days for less than a single trip to McDonald’s for 2 people now.
I guess the dinner I served saturday night was just a drug induced hallucination then, afterall… You seem to clearly know what I do and have done better than I do.
Funny how the goalposts shift from “its easy and cheap to eat healthy” to “You’re not who we’re talking about, we’re talking about other, more convenient and strawmannable people”
That’s not shifting the goal post, it’s calling out your bullshit that somehow a $5 red Baron pizza for 4 people is enough to make people fat. 380 calories is 1/4 of a red Baron Pepperoni pizza, if you ate one 3 a day, that’s less than most adults can survive on, you’re going to lose weight. So no I’m not the one moving some goal post or creating a strawman, that’s your doing.
Literally no one said a red baron for 4 people will make you fat. I asked for a healthy alternative that can feed a family for the same exceedingly low price. Nothing more, nothing less. Certainly nothing to deserve your insane aggression and bullshit over.
So now you are not only shifting goal posts, you are doing the classic internet bullshit of replying to your own imaginary idea of what people said.
No shit, that’s why I said you pointing this out was not the discussion at hand. You pointed it out that a $5 red Baron could feed 4 people, because healthy food is more expensive. I called that out as bullshit. This entire thread is about people who complain that it’s hard to eat healthy and not be fat.
I called that out as bullshit. This entire thread is about people who complain that it’s hard to eat healthy and not be fat.
… where you proceed to lose your shit and act like a cunt when someone asks how to provide a “healthy” meal for the same low costs as an unhealthy meal.
Beans and rice. (Red beans and rice, black beans and rice, garbanzo beans in curry on rice, you can make probably a hundred delicious variations on beans and rice)
A can of pureed pumpkin and a can of white beans with seasoning and a little chicken broth, heated and blended, makes a healthy and delicious soup.
A can of tomatoes, an onion, a couple dried Chiles and a can of pinto beans also makes an incredible pureed soup.
Up until recently I’d have said eggs and toast, but eggs are expensive lately. Still probably under $5 to feed 4 though.
We bought a frozen turkey cheap after Christmas and my God that made so many meals, I still have 3 quarts of stock too.
I don’t think a frozen pizza is a good deal in terms of nutrition but we do sometimes have that or the Little Caesars one if I can’t cook that night.
None of us are fat, husband is overweight but fit, and the rest of us are on the thin side.
Love how everyone is like “beans and rice!” and totally ignoring the energy and time it takes to make such things. And not everyone is a fan of beans and rice. At the end of the day being able to have a slice of pizza may be the only bright spot when you’re living paycheck to paycheck.
Add comment