this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
273 points (85.3% liked)
Funny
9508 readers
2967 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
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
I acknowledged that shame doesn’t help with weight loss and that legitimate medical conditions can cause you to gain weight. But at the end of the day we have something called the conservation of energy if you like I can drop a link explaining it but if a person doesn’t consume energy then the energy level in their body can’t go up. Fat is a form of stored chemical energy. Therefore the single way that people end up fat is overconsumption of calories.
I explained several of the medical reasons why a person might be more likely to over consume calories even though many of them are very rare but if you can find a single reliable source that shows a person consuming less calories than they burn and managing sustained weight gain (ignoring water weight transients) I will backtrack on everything I said and acknowledge I am wrong
Fat isn't necessarily just about CICO. Someone might have a disorder causing them to store more fat than, for example, build muscle. You might have a thyroid disorder causing you to feel lethargic despite the fact that you ate a BMR level of calories, so you end up storing the remaining energy as fat. Not even getting into the variety of ways human behavior is illogical and can't reasonably be answered with "just eat less." Treatment for eating disorders is not like that.
Do you have a way that a person can gain weight at a calorie deficit? I acknowledged already that people can have a lot of physical changes that cause them to overeat but at the end of the day overeating is the problem
I feel like I reasonably addressed the basic issue. I don't think someone can gain literal weight without eating more calories than they consume, because that is how thermodynamics work. But it's not always as straightforward as over eating, and it doesn't always feel like over eating. For example, common cases of obesity in the US are due to a high amount of hyper processed foods that are calorie dense but don't feel filling. Fat people don't gorge themselves every meal, they eat what feels like a regular amount to sate their hunger. That's why semaglutides are so effective, they make you feel hungry less and full faster. And shame based approaches at making people eat less have been proven not to work, because they don't teach them to choose better foods or make them feel less hungry.
So the problem is a lack of knowledge? Because we have a ton of available knowledge out there all a person has to do is acknowledge that they have a problem and choose to fix it. Almost all goods are required to have calories listed on the side as well so while you might not feel full eating an entire family size bag of Doritos if you acknowledged that you were an unhealthy weight and had any desire to change it you could quickly see that the bag of Doritos is more than 2000 kcal.
I personally believe the real problem is a lack of will power, as information is very readily available. Now some medical conditions can require significantly more will power to lose weight such as people who feel lightheaded while still consuming excess calories but all semiglutides do is make it so you don’t need as much will power. I still think that’s a great option for people who have a desire to lose weight but they need a desire to lose weight first