this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
310 points (98.1% liked)
Stolen from Facebook
467 readers
1 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is what body acceptance should be. Making people not feel like they are worthless failures because they are obese.
Unfortunately the health-at-any-size people took that and made it to mean fat means healthy, and that couldn't be fatter from the truth.
Being fat long-term is unhealthy. Uncontestable fact. But that doesn't mean that being fat is subhuman.
Personally I'm of the belief that obesity is often a symptom of something else, usually mental health. A bad relationship with food and/or a lack of physical activity is an easy trap to fall into as a symptom of anxiety or depression, and it spirals from there. Accepting your fat body (or more accurately, feeling confident despite it) is then an important step in breaking that cycle and changing it.
Some of it is genetic too. My dad was the healthiest man I ever knew. He exercised 5-days a week, ate healthy, didn’t smoke, and only drank red wine due to its heart benefits. But he still had a high BMI. He just couldn’t shed the belly fat.
Spoiler alert, it’s still calories in calories out. Some people burn fewer calories as a baseline, (Called NEAT) which means they can’t eat quite as much without gaining weight.
The biggest issue is most people are absolutely horrible at counting calories. They think they consumed 2000 in a day, but it was actually 3000 because they didn’t count pop, beer, snacks, condiments etc.
If one is truly in a calorie deficit, no amount of bad genetics will keep them from losing weight.
It isn't just what you're saying with not counting soda, etc, though. CICO is pretty complicated, especially with newer research about how gut bacteria can alter body weight without changing caloric intake. Burger and pizza calories really aren't the same as broccoli and lentil calories.
It's not really possible to accurately count calories burned either, as metabolism is all over the place. People with energy to spare will engage in more NEAT, and people in a deficit will conserve energy.
I agree it’s not possible to count exactly how many calories you burn. The basic idea is you guess how many you burn and consume that amount of calories each day. If over weeks/months you are gaining weight then you are eating too many calories, and you adjust, until your weight is stable. Now you know roughly how many your burn in a day. It’s literally that simple.
1000 calories of pizza and 1000 calories of broccoli is the exact same from a weight gain point of view. If your maintenance calories are 2000, and you eat exactly 2000 calories of pizza, and only pizza, you will not gain weight. You’ll be extremely unhealthy in other ways due lack of proper vitamins.
Also 2000 calories of pizza is doable in one sitting, and you won’t feel very full so it would be easy to eat more, but good luck eating 2000 calories of broccoli in a day, the volume of food is much higher.
They are not the same because different bacteria eat different things, and some of those bacteria are associated with weight loss and gain. We can quite literally feed mice akkermansia muciniphila and cause them to lose weight without changing their caloric intake.
With this you admit that there's more to it than just CICO. If you eat 2000 calories and still feel like you're starving then of course you're going to fail your diet. What you eat is extremely important for a variety of reasons.
I'm not sure I've ever encountered a dietician that recommended counting calories for weight loss or health. They all say to eat healthy foods, avoid junk, and to eat when you're hungry, stop when you're not. And it turns out eating healthy is exactly what fosters the gut bacteria associated with healthy body composition.
Do you have a link to the mice study? That sounds interesting.
How am I admitting it’s more than CICO? What I said aligns directly with CICO. If you eat junk, you are eating high calorie dense foods, and people tend to eat more because it’s not as filling. That’s literally CICO. You eat more calories, and you gain weight.
The reason dieticians recommend not actually counting calories is because people suck at it, as was mentioned before. By telling them to eat healthy, low calorie foods, it makes it basically impossible to eat too many calories due to the giant volume of food you would need to eat.
In the end it all boils down to calories. You cannot escape the laws of physics. You can’t gain mass without adding mass.