LMlurker
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2021
Part 1: Sugar causes obesity
Refined sugar is what causes obesity. It has very little to do with psychology or willpower, especially in moderate cases.
Obesity is an epidemic; it's a massive change that happened all over society all at once in the 1970s. An epidemic is not likely to be multi-causal when it persists in populations which vary across most potential causal vectors; construction workers are fat, office workers are fat, urban people are fat, rural people are fat. People in many different countries eating varied diets are fat. One of the few countries with a low obesity rate is Japan, and while the number is slowly rising it's still far lower than almost any other developed nation. The Japanese don't normally eat very much sugar; iirc, 7-14g per day to the USA's 70g average. They have a cultural predisposition to enjoy bitter food.
Sugar causes obesity due to its hormonal effects. The human body is very efficient at extracting calories from food. Anything that points to insulin levels, glycemic index, fat retention, etc is witchcraft, like most nutrition science. The real silver bullet for weight control is appetite modulation, and this is hormonal.
The hormone which regulates appetite and makes you feel hungry is ghrelin. Refined sugar is made up of two components: glucose and fructose. Glucose is a carb, like bread, and is digested in the stomach. Fructose is digested mostly in the liver; rather, metabolized, because this is the term one uses for a drug. This metabolization has numerous side effects, but the only important one is that it interferes with ghrelin processes. Your body begins over-producing it, and grows resistant to/underproduces the leptin which counteracts it. You grow more hungry, more often, and will begin to overeat.
The hunger-inducing effects of refined sugar are moderate, and only cause overeating and weight gain at high doses consumed over long periods of time. However, high doses will almost always be sought, unless conscious action is taken to restrain consumption. This is because sugar is chemically addictive. This means that it creates a strong dopamine response upon consumption, and that cessation of consumption causes physical withdrawal. As with any drug, continued use increases tolerance, leading to higher and higher intake. Tolerance is not gained, however, to the hunger effect. The result of this is greater and greater overeating, and consequently, obesity.
The narrative of obesity that most people push involves two components: Sedentary lifestyles and plentifully available food. This narrative is flawed and lacks basic counterfactual thinking and a historical perspective.
A: Wealthy people have not historically been anywhere near as fat as modern people, until the sugar industry began in the 18th century.
B: Exercise is a very minor component of weight control. Every personal trainer will tell you this. Weight is lost in the kitchen, not the gym, because the calories burnt through exercise are minor— about 100 calories per mile ran, which is about half a Snicker. The human body is efficient.
C: Even if B were not the case, obesity persists in populations that exercise daily. Construction workers, miners, and oil riggers are all generally fat.
D: Obesity in modern America corresponds to class. The people most secure in their ability to buy whatever food they want (the top 20%) have lower obesity rates than the rest of the country, because they eat fewer processed foods with added sugar. The ability to obtain good/plentiful food does not match the tendency to overeat.
Here are various misconceptions about food that prevent people from realizing that sugar is the culprit and losing weight:
"Carbs are the real problem, they screw up your glycemic index/ keep you out of ketogenesis"
People have eaten mostly carbs throughout history, and have only been fat since the 70s. People eat carbs abundantly in Japan, and the Japanese aren't fat. The caloric effects of ketogenesis are minor, because the human body is efficient. The reason keto works so well is that refined sugar is a carb (due to the presence of sucrose), so people stop eating it as part of the diet.
"What you really need is just a balanced diet and moderation in everything"
What you are doing when you say this is confronting a chain of deductive logic with a general principle. If you do not disagree with my premises, you must agree with my conclusions. A general principle is only as accurate as a contravening chain of deductive logic is inaccurate in its basis.
Furthermore, the tendency to make weight-loss about discipline, self-transformation, and achievement sets the entire process of engaging with it at the wrong tempo. More on that presently.
"Lmao just eat less, it's called self control"
Self control is the use of the executive functions to modulate behavior. The executive functions are necessarily object-oriented, and can spend their attention on a limited number of things at one time. To modulate diet purely through "willpower" is to maintain constant conscious vigilance to contravene the natural impulse of your hormonal response, like holding urine in your bladder. You are attempting to counter a continuous, long term problem with occasional, short term attention.
This cannot last forever, because self control is a limited resource and the hunger effect of sugar is continuous, and the dopamine effect escalates with consumption. Without cessation of fructose consumption, you will eventually fail. This is why crash-diets almost always fail. Luckily, obesity is not a natural state, and removing hormone distorting chemicals from your diet will cause you to return to a normal weight.
Part 2: How to Quit Eating Sugar
The process for ceasing sugar consumption is the same as the process for quitting any drug. You need to stop cold, go through ~3 weeks of withdrawal, and then continue to avoid consumption. While it is addictive, it is not terribly so, and if the process of recovery is entered into with conviction it is not difficult to achieve. Here are a few ideas which helped me to recover from my addiction to it:
A: Sugar does not actually improve your life or make you happy. All that it does is create a craving, which you then satisfy, providing a rush of dopamine. It takes a gentle up and down curve of satisfaction and exaggerates it, but the overall trend remains static, with weight gain slowly tipping it downwards. It creates a problem for you to solve; it does not solve a problem you already have. Like any drug, it has its time and place (holidays and birthdays), but daily sugar consumption is like daily alcohol consumption.
B: The worsening symptoms of withdrawal indicate that the process is working. They provide you with evidence that yes, you are physically dependent on this substance, and that if you continue to avoid it, you will no longer be so.
C: Intense sugar consumption creates a dramatic daily dopamine rise and crash, which creates early afternoon exhaustion and other low energy periods. These fluctuations are not natural, and go away quickly once sugar withdrawal stops, leaving you more alert more often, even before appetite modulation and weight loss sets in.
Quiting sugar through this 3-week process (albeit with one or two binges) worked for me. Afterwards, I was careful to restrict consumption to holidays, on which I eat as much as I want so long as it is theme-appropriate. I eat no more than 2 pieces of fruit per day.
Over the course of the next 5 months, I lost 40 pounds, bringing me down to 5'11" 165lb, where I have remained since. I made no other effort to eat healthily or restrict my diet in any way, and did not exercise.
Keep in mind that certain other substances (Lexapro, for instance) have similar appetite-enlargening effects which might interfere with your results.
Part 3: Why this is not common knowledge
I strongly suspect that the knowledge that sugar causes overeating and (therefore) obesity is commonly held in the food industry. Fast food restaurants have a concept called "the bliss point", which is the amount of sugar they can add to a savory food item like a chicken sandwich at which the addictive properties kick in, but the taste is not noticeable.
The marketing which takes advantage of this addiction and sells sugar as a way of celebrating/treating yourself/indulging may have arisen organically out of normal market research; however, the utter silence of academic nutrition scientists on the matter, when they'll speculate on literally anything else, speaks volumes to me. Nutrition science, since it deals in controlled studies moreso than epidemiological or population-level data, is almost entirely bullshit. It's the kind of academic process you can shove anything you want into, like sociology. The same people that convinced an entire generation that dietary fat leads to obesity and heart disease are at the head of the field in tenured positions now. These types of people are easy to buy.
If there really is a food lobby fatwa on research into the hunger effects of refined sugar, I anticipate that this is mostly motivated by the profit to be had in the addictive nature of sugar, rather than a desire to keep poor people fat. They've convinced people that sugar is a harmless addiction, which is more durable and valuable than convincing them it has no effects whatsoever.
Part 3: More extreme obesity
It is intuitive to me that more extreme obesity, which doesn't seem to tether itself to the same "try and fail to lose weight every few months" discipline cycle as moderate obesity, might operate by a different principle than the standard sugar loop. However, reflecting on the fact that the vast majority of extreme obesity begins in childhood, it is entirely possible that it is simply the result of more extreme addiction to refined sugar.
Unlike, say, heroin, refined sugar is almost impossible to overdose on. As such, the tolerance escalation process that leads to heroin overdoses has no natural endpoint for fructose. If the hunger-inducing effect simply continues escalating along with consumption, this seems to me to be an independently sufficient cause of extreme obesity.
The question of "Why don't you stop yourself before it gets that bad?" is generally asked of these people. But if their obesity begins in childhood, the point at which they reach "that bad" would normally be early adolescence. During this time most people have limited control over the logistics of their diet, and limited emotional capacity for dealing with difficult problems. Childhood obesity similarly isolates individuals from the group pressures which might motivate them to take drastic dietary action; they've never been part of the "acceptably attractive" group, and so receive no social pressure to remain within it. Once one has hit a certain weight, the difference between 5'5" 250 pounds and 5'5" 300 pounds is negligible, in terms of its consequences. A fat person is a fat person, until they begin edging towards 400 and having health issues. They generally pass the point of no return too early to walk back from it.
I am uncertain whether refined sugar cessation would be sufficient to address extreme obesity. It might be the case that emergent physical or psychological properties change the nature of overeating once a certain threshold is passed. It might not be the case, and standard recovery would work. I lack the data to guess.
Part 4: Evo-bio speculation
Castaways floating on life rafts experience a strong craving for the eyes of the fish they catch. This is because fish eyes are high in essential vitamins and amino acids which are not contained in other parts of the fish.
It seems plausible to me that the hunger effects of fructose evolved similarly. Fruits contain large amounts of vitamins which are otherwise difficult to obtain, and were (prior to agriculture) somewhat difficult and unpleasant to eat, with large seeds and thick rinds. A moderate hormonal response to sweetness which induces hunger would encourage hunter-gatherers, or even animals, to eat larger amounts of fruits on those infrequent occasions on which they came across them, making it easier for them to consume sufficient vitamins.
An element of this train of thought which might be enlightening can be found in the hunger effects of artificial sweeteners. These are often metabolized quite differently from fructose. If they generate hunger effects in similar proportion to fructose, it seems likely to me that the hunger response is a response to sweet tastes, rather than a side effect of the process of fructolysis. However, I lack the data to make this determination, or to evaluate how it impacts the likelihood of this Evo-bio hypothesis.
Part 5: Social Consequences of Obesity as Sugar Addiction
Social convention currently treats obesity as one of two things: a terrible moral failing, or a permanent unavoidable affliction. Neither of these things are helpful to the obese, or to those who interact with them. The former has continually and consistently failed to encourage people to lose weight, and the latter is certain to prevent it.
If refined sugar consumption is the primary cause of overeating and therefore obesity, the manner in which society interacts with the obese should naturally change along with it.
For instance, it is now utterly unacceptable to tell a romantic partner whom you are refusing "I would consider it if you were not fat". If obesity is a moral failing, this is extremely judgemental and rude. If obesity is a permanent affliction, this is discriminatory and shallow. However, under the sugar-obesity paradigm, this should be considered in the same light as "If you didn't drink so much, I'd consider it." As an interpersonal interaction, this is far closer to acceptable.
Obesity as a solvable problem with a prescribed solution presents far fewer social difficulties than the current model. Much of the moral indignation attached to it (hating fat people as an outlet for rage against the generally incompetent/incompetence of the world) would cease to be reasonable, and all of the moral defenses of it (treating fat people as a protected class deserving of toleration) would likewise dissipate.
Naturally, this website would have to adjust its tenor slightly, if its users convinced themselves of the truth of this paradigm. But making fun of someone for being fat because they're gross isn't that different from making fun of someone for being fat because they're a junkie, so sufficient common knowledge of the role sugar plays in overeating would level the playing field back to where it is now.
Part 6: What to Do Instead of Whining
Just try it. After three to four weeks of withdrawal, if you immediately notice your energy levels grow more consistent throughout the day, then the process has already been worthwhile, if only to see what you're missing in terms of daily energy.
After you're through withdrawal, just go two or three months, and see if you're eating less and losing weight. It's a very easy diet to sustain- you just cut out sweets and look for sugar-less bread. Switch from soda to sparkling water and check fast food menus for lower sugar options.
If you haven't seen any results in a few months, you can come back to this thread to tell me what a lying deceitful sack of shit I am. But if you do see results, then you've dramatically improved your quality of life for basically no cost in effort or money.
Be sure to report back with your results if you do try it, I'm eager to get more data.
Refined sugar is what causes obesity. It has very little to do with psychology or willpower, especially in moderate cases.
Obesity is an epidemic; it's a massive change that happened all over society all at once in the 1970s. An epidemic is not likely to be multi-causal when it persists in populations which vary across most potential causal vectors; construction workers are fat, office workers are fat, urban people are fat, rural people are fat. People in many different countries eating varied diets are fat. One of the few countries with a low obesity rate is Japan, and while the number is slowly rising it's still far lower than almost any other developed nation. The Japanese don't normally eat very much sugar; iirc, 7-14g per day to the USA's 70g average. They have a cultural predisposition to enjoy bitter food.
Sugar causes obesity due to its hormonal effects. The human body is very efficient at extracting calories from food. Anything that points to insulin levels, glycemic index, fat retention, etc is witchcraft, like most nutrition science. The real silver bullet for weight control is appetite modulation, and this is hormonal.
The hormone which regulates appetite and makes you feel hungry is ghrelin. Refined sugar is made up of two components: glucose and fructose. Glucose is a carb, like bread, and is digested in the stomach. Fructose is digested mostly in the liver; rather, metabolized, because this is the term one uses for a drug. This metabolization has numerous side effects, but the only important one is that it interferes with ghrelin processes. Your body begins over-producing it, and grows resistant to/underproduces the leptin which counteracts it. You grow more hungry, more often, and will begin to overeat.
The hunger-inducing effects of refined sugar are moderate, and only cause overeating and weight gain at high doses consumed over long periods of time. However, high doses will almost always be sought, unless conscious action is taken to restrain consumption. This is because sugar is chemically addictive. This means that it creates a strong dopamine response upon consumption, and that cessation of consumption causes physical withdrawal. As with any drug, continued use increases tolerance, leading to higher and higher intake. Tolerance is not gained, however, to the hunger effect. The result of this is greater and greater overeating, and consequently, obesity.
The narrative of obesity that most people push involves two components: Sedentary lifestyles and plentifully available food. This narrative is flawed and lacks basic counterfactual thinking and a historical perspective.
A: Wealthy people have not historically been anywhere near as fat as modern people, until the sugar industry began in the 18th century.
B: Exercise is a very minor component of weight control. Every personal trainer will tell you this. Weight is lost in the kitchen, not the gym, because the calories burnt through exercise are minor— about 100 calories per mile ran, which is about half a Snicker. The human body is efficient.
C: Even if B were not the case, obesity persists in populations that exercise daily. Construction workers, miners, and oil riggers are all generally fat.
D: Obesity in modern America corresponds to class. The people most secure in their ability to buy whatever food they want (the top 20%) have lower obesity rates than the rest of the country, because they eat fewer processed foods with added sugar. The ability to obtain good/plentiful food does not match the tendency to overeat.
Here are various misconceptions about food that prevent people from realizing that sugar is the culprit and losing weight:
"Carbs are the real problem, they screw up your glycemic index/ keep you out of ketogenesis"
People have eaten mostly carbs throughout history, and have only been fat since the 70s. People eat carbs abundantly in Japan, and the Japanese aren't fat. The caloric effects of ketogenesis are minor, because the human body is efficient. The reason keto works so well is that refined sugar is a carb (due to the presence of sucrose), so people stop eating it as part of the diet.
"What you really need is just a balanced diet and moderation in everything"
What you are doing when you say this is confronting a chain of deductive logic with a general principle. If you do not disagree with my premises, you must agree with my conclusions. A general principle is only as accurate as a contravening chain of deductive logic is inaccurate in its basis.
Furthermore, the tendency to make weight-loss about discipline, self-transformation, and achievement sets the entire process of engaging with it at the wrong tempo. More on that presently.
"Lmao just eat less, it's called self control"
Self control is the use of the executive functions to modulate behavior. The executive functions are necessarily object-oriented, and can spend their attention on a limited number of things at one time. To modulate diet purely through "willpower" is to maintain constant conscious vigilance to contravene the natural impulse of your hormonal response, like holding urine in your bladder. You are attempting to counter a continuous, long term problem with occasional, short term attention.
This cannot last forever, because self control is a limited resource and the hunger effect of sugar is continuous, and the dopamine effect escalates with consumption. Without cessation of fructose consumption, you will eventually fail. This is why crash-diets almost always fail. Luckily, obesity is not a natural state, and removing hormone distorting chemicals from your diet will cause you to return to a normal weight.
Part 2: How to Quit Eating Sugar
The process for ceasing sugar consumption is the same as the process for quitting any drug. You need to stop cold, go through ~3 weeks of withdrawal, and then continue to avoid consumption. While it is addictive, it is not terribly so, and if the process of recovery is entered into with conviction it is not difficult to achieve. Here are a few ideas which helped me to recover from my addiction to it:
A: Sugar does not actually improve your life or make you happy. All that it does is create a craving, which you then satisfy, providing a rush of dopamine. It takes a gentle up and down curve of satisfaction and exaggerates it, but the overall trend remains static, with weight gain slowly tipping it downwards. It creates a problem for you to solve; it does not solve a problem you already have. Like any drug, it has its time and place (holidays and birthdays), but daily sugar consumption is like daily alcohol consumption.
B: The worsening symptoms of withdrawal indicate that the process is working. They provide you with evidence that yes, you are physically dependent on this substance, and that if you continue to avoid it, you will no longer be so.
C: Intense sugar consumption creates a dramatic daily dopamine rise and crash, which creates early afternoon exhaustion and other low energy periods. These fluctuations are not natural, and go away quickly once sugar withdrawal stops, leaving you more alert more often, even before appetite modulation and weight loss sets in.
Quiting sugar through this 3-week process (albeit with one or two binges) worked for me. Afterwards, I was careful to restrict consumption to holidays, on which I eat as much as I want so long as it is theme-appropriate. I eat no more than 2 pieces of fruit per day.
Over the course of the next 5 months, I lost 40 pounds, bringing me down to 5'11" 165lb, where I have remained since. I made no other effort to eat healthily or restrict my diet in any way, and did not exercise.
Keep in mind that certain other substances (Lexapro, for instance) have similar appetite-enlargening effects which might interfere with your results.
Part 3: Why this is not common knowledge
I strongly suspect that the knowledge that sugar causes overeating and (therefore) obesity is commonly held in the food industry. Fast food restaurants have a concept called "the bliss point", which is the amount of sugar they can add to a savory food item like a chicken sandwich at which the addictive properties kick in, but the taste is not noticeable.
The marketing which takes advantage of this addiction and sells sugar as a way of celebrating/treating yourself/indulging may have arisen organically out of normal market research; however, the utter silence of academic nutrition scientists on the matter, when they'll speculate on literally anything else, speaks volumes to me. Nutrition science, since it deals in controlled studies moreso than epidemiological or population-level data, is almost entirely bullshit. It's the kind of academic process you can shove anything you want into, like sociology. The same people that convinced an entire generation that dietary fat leads to obesity and heart disease are at the head of the field in tenured positions now. These types of people are easy to buy.
If there really is a food lobby fatwa on research into the hunger effects of refined sugar, I anticipate that this is mostly motivated by the profit to be had in the addictive nature of sugar, rather than a desire to keep poor people fat. They've convinced people that sugar is a harmless addiction, which is more durable and valuable than convincing them it has no effects whatsoever.
Part 3: More extreme obesity
It is intuitive to me that more extreme obesity, which doesn't seem to tether itself to the same "try and fail to lose weight every few months" discipline cycle as moderate obesity, might operate by a different principle than the standard sugar loop. However, reflecting on the fact that the vast majority of extreme obesity begins in childhood, it is entirely possible that it is simply the result of more extreme addiction to refined sugar.
Unlike, say, heroin, refined sugar is almost impossible to overdose on. As such, the tolerance escalation process that leads to heroin overdoses has no natural endpoint for fructose. If the hunger-inducing effect simply continues escalating along with consumption, this seems to me to be an independently sufficient cause of extreme obesity.
The question of "Why don't you stop yourself before it gets that bad?" is generally asked of these people. But if their obesity begins in childhood, the point at which they reach "that bad" would normally be early adolescence. During this time most people have limited control over the logistics of their diet, and limited emotional capacity for dealing with difficult problems. Childhood obesity similarly isolates individuals from the group pressures which might motivate them to take drastic dietary action; they've never been part of the "acceptably attractive" group, and so receive no social pressure to remain within it. Once one has hit a certain weight, the difference between 5'5" 250 pounds and 5'5" 300 pounds is negligible, in terms of its consequences. A fat person is a fat person, until they begin edging towards 400 and having health issues. They generally pass the point of no return too early to walk back from it.
I am uncertain whether refined sugar cessation would be sufficient to address extreme obesity. It might be the case that emergent physical or psychological properties change the nature of overeating once a certain threshold is passed. It might not be the case, and standard recovery would work. I lack the data to guess.
Part 4: Evo-bio speculation
Castaways floating on life rafts experience a strong craving for the eyes of the fish they catch. This is because fish eyes are high in essential vitamins and amino acids which are not contained in other parts of the fish.
It seems plausible to me that the hunger effects of fructose evolved similarly. Fruits contain large amounts of vitamins which are otherwise difficult to obtain, and were (prior to agriculture) somewhat difficult and unpleasant to eat, with large seeds and thick rinds. A moderate hormonal response to sweetness which induces hunger would encourage hunter-gatherers, or even animals, to eat larger amounts of fruits on those infrequent occasions on which they came across them, making it easier for them to consume sufficient vitamins.
An element of this train of thought which might be enlightening can be found in the hunger effects of artificial sweeteners. These are often metabolized quite differently from fructose. If they generate hunger effects in similar proportion to fructose, it seems likely to me that the hunger response is a response to sweet tastes, rather than a side effect of the process of fructolysis. However, I lack the data to make this determination, or to evaluate how it impacts the likelihood of this Evo-bio hypothesis.
Part 5: Social Consequences of Obesity as Sugar Addiction
Social convention currently treats obesity as one of two things: a terrible moral failing, or a permanent unavoidable affliction. Neither of these things are helpful to the obese, or to those who interact with them. The former has continually and consistently failed to encourage people to lose weight, and the latter is certain to prevent it.
If refined sugar consumption is the primary cause of overeating and therefore obesity, the manner in which society interacts with the obese should naturally change along with it.
For instance, it is now utterly unacceptable to tell a romantic partner whom you are refusing "I would consider it if you were not fat". If obesity is a moral failing, this is extremely judgemental and rude. If obesity is a permanent affliction, this is discriminatory and shallow. However, under the sugar-obesity paradigm, this should be considered in the same light as "If you didn't drink so much, I'd consider it." As an interpersonal interaction, this is far closer to acceptable.
Obesity as a solvable problem with a prescribed solution presents far fewer social difficulties than the current model. Much of the moral indignation attached to it (hating fat people as an outlet for rage against the generally incompetent/incompetence of the world) would cease to be reasonable, and all of the moral defenses of it (treating fat people as a protected class deserving of toleration) would likewise dissipate.
Naturally, this website would have to adjust its tenor slightly, if its users convinced themselves of the truth of this paradigm. But making fun of someone for being fat because they're gross isn't that different from making fun of someone for being fat because they're a junkie, so sufficient common knowledge of the role sugar plays in overeating would level the playing field back to where it is now.
Part 6: What to Do Instead of Whining
Just try it. After three to four weeks of withdrawal, if you immediately notice your energy levels grow more consistent throughout the day, then the process has already been worthwhile, if only to see what you're missing in terms of daily energy.
After you're through withdrawal, just go two or three months, and see if you're eating less and losing weight. It's a very easy diet to sustain- you just cut out sweets and look for sugar-less bread. Switch from soda to sparkling water and check fast food menus for lower sugar options.
If you haven't seen any results in a few months, you can come back to this thread to tell me what a lying deceitful sack of shit I am. But if you do see results, then you've dramatically improved your quality of life for basically no cost in effort or money.
Be sure to report back with your results if you do try it, I'm eager to get more data.
