Well, some of it will be muscle mass. Gotta be able to carry around more weight and all.
So does protein.
But not simple carbs. Cutting simple carbs is critical.
Agreed.
Interesting, thanks. I was mistaken thinking that excess dietary fat can be excreted but it cannot -
On a related note, I’ve been making beef, lamb or goat stew for the last couple of years using cheaper cuts of bone-in meat (often called soup bones). The first couple of batches I would have a bowl before taking out the fat and I would feel a bit queasy for a few hours after. Now I don’t sample it until day two, after taking off all the fat that has formed at the top when I’ve cooled it overnight. No more queasiness. Incidentally, I use a bit of that fat (tallow, suet?), after I’ve refined it, to saute the vegetables before adding to the stew.
More weight requires more energy to move around. At some point you will reach a caloric equilibrium.
I am sure there exists a slice of pizza and a ham and cheese sandwich that are roughly the same. If I make a sandwich for lunch, its two slices of bread, or equivalent, a slice of cheese, and some ham. Bread is 150 calories, cheese is 100, and ham is somewhere between 100-200 calories for 3oz depending on how lean it is, so 400-500 calories? Half a frozen pizza is more in the 700-900 calorie range?
You could start swapping out for better bread, and increasing the ham to add protein, and get to a much nutritionally better option that should keep you full longer. But I think you are highlighting one of the common mistakes people make on focusing on calories alone. That’s a bit of my own opinion that it is a mistake since we have all absolutely been taught to read labels and understand calories and you aren’t “wrong.”
Moving is for suckers. 
I suppose that balance is hard to predict. How much extra energy needed to move a greater weight vs the disincentive to move as much as you had previously due to greater weight.
I like moving 
I started on a better diet and exercise and my weight dropped like 5% a month when my BMI was at 28 and leveled out as I approached a BMI of around 23-24. I may have added back in a few calories towards the end, but it was pretty clear that I was not going to be able to eat a 28 BMI diet at a 23 BMI weight without doing a lot more moving than I liked.
I was skimming this too quickly and misread this:
as
It is estimated that about 19% of the population resides in rural areas, which encompasses 97% of America’s total lardass.
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From what I was finding, a whole frozen pizza is between 900 and 1000 calories, so half would be between 450 and 500 calories.
No moral just illustrating the system. If we seek to address obesity we have to address the system.
Interrupt the system with one or more of these
- Change human evolutionary biology of wanting sweet, salt, fat. (I believe there are med that do this now if you don’t mind the side effects)
- Educate and/or remove advertising that misleads consumers so the consumer can make better choices.
- Make bad calories unprofitable (I am purposefully leaving bad undefined) and good calories profitable.
- Build in flexibility to address unintended consequences of our changes.
That all sounds like a lot of regulations and a bit of stomping on how we define the 1st Amendment.
A change in food or body chemistry? Increased travel allowing people to acquire “new” to them bacterial variants during their travel that are superior to their existing fauna during their travels which subsequently spreads to the population at home? Bacterial.evolution?
I feel like that might be pushing the lower end of the range…the last one I personally had was a motor city pepperoni from Costco that was 6x410 per pizza. I will agree, if someone eats half of a 900 calorie frozen pizza, it’s not going to be much different than a ham sandwich. I would not want to generalize that frozen pizza is an equivalent choice…a ham sandwich is really not great either, so that slope is already slippery.
The travel theory sounds fishy. I am still pretty skeptical there wasn’t another flaw in the study on how they measured activity. I know our food is different, and how our bodies process that is different…could an HFCS calorie be absorbed more efficiently than a raw sugar calorie? Maybe?
HFCS calories are problematic because they can contain more fructose vs raw sugar (sucrose).
HFCS and Sucrose are both fructose-glucose molecules.
HFCS is 42%-55% fructose (with 55% used in soft drinks)
Sucrose (raw sugar) is 50% fructose
The problem with both HFCS and Sucrose is the fructose content (fructose is added to glucose because it is sweeter).
Your liver can only handle about 50g of fructose in a 24hr period. This is a known physiological limitation in humans as stored liver glyocogen is limited (vs muscle glycogen).
Any excess over that 50g will get converted directly to fat and you will also see an incrase in blood triglycerides (this can be dangerous over time).
So the more HFCS you consume with excess calories, the more fat you will put on and the unhealthier you will be.
Concerning if true…
“Chronic diseases represent a major challenge in world health. Metabolic syndrome is a constellation of disturbances affecting several organs, and it has been proposed to be a liver-centered condition. Fructose overconsumption may result in insulin resistance, oxidative stress, inflammation, elevated uric acid levels, increased blood pressure, and increased triglyceride concentrations in both the blood and liver. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a term widely used to describe excessive fatty infiltration in the liver in the absence of alcohol, autoimmune disorders, or viral hepatitis; it is attributed to obesity, high sugar and fat consumption, and sedentarism. If untreated, NAFLD can progress to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), characterized by inflammation and mild fibrosis in addition to fat infiltration and, eventually, advanced scar tissue deposition, cirrhosis, and finally liver cancer, which constitutes the culmination of the disease.”
Figuring this out should be a top priority for the US and policymakers.
So, no Indian food then.
Why so obese, all around the world? I have no proof of anything. But some of the pieces are:
*A world of abundance * grain production, in particular. Great book on this, The Wizard and the Prophet. Basically, how hybrids and GMO rid the world of famine. Famine was a really big deal through human history. It toppled empires.
Understanding obesity. The human biology involved in human hunger is fascinating. Look into the precise reason Ozempic causes weight loss. It disrupts the signal (lipids) that your brain interprets as “I need food”. The mind/body detects the concentration of lipids and works to keep it level. Every fat cell produces lipids. This internal regulator gets reset as you add fat, triggering hunger impulse to eat even if you don’t need it. Why? Because human evolution preferred creatures that did not die in winter. Store up some calories for the long nights ahead. Eat until we hit the fat level needed to go a while. This is not really needed when there is over abundance.
And lastly, sedentary life styles. For this I have no source. But I blame the car centric culture. Christ, drive thru bakeries and lattes? You don’t even walk to the counter? A quip from a friend who visited me in NYC back in the 90s. “I’ve never seen so many rich men and thin women anywhere”. In Manhattan, you walk a lot. The current trend of “deliver it to my door tomorrow”, might negate all that.
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