My layman’s understanding (and personal experience based on self-experimentation over the past decade trying to get to a healthy weight range) has been that this is a threshold problem. For generations we’ve been gradually making intentional and unintentional changes to diet, activity, and environment that make it a little harder for our bodies to regulate weight, until eventually we use up the slack and start actually gaining.
I think this is important, because if true, it means that there will never be a silver bullet, nor a single solution at either an individual or societal level. It also means the solutions don’t have to look like the proximal cause that “pushed us over the edge” if it’s easier to reverse changes that happened much earlier, or if we need to do other things to overcome sources of hysteresis in our bodies’ weight-regulation systems. We have a lot of possible levers: Reducing pollution, eliminating exposure to certain chemicals, curing some infections, altering diet composition and methods of food preparation, altering timing and number of meals, altering speed and social context of eating, reducing various forms of stress, varying all the different dimensions of type and duration of exercise, changing how we sleep, changing indoor lighting and air quality, changing time spent outdoors, improving hydration, reducing chronic inflammation, and that’s just what I thought of in two minutes. It is hard to do plan and stick to enough self-experimentation over a long enough time to find out what actually works for an individual, even for very smart and educated people.
My layman’s understanding (and personal experience based on self-experimentation over the past decade trying to get to a healthy weight range) has been that this is a threshold problem. For generations we’ve been gradually making intentional and unintentional changes to diet, activity, and environment that make it a little harder for our bodies to regulate weight, until eventually we use up the slack and start actually gaining.
I think this is important, because if true, it means that there will never be a silver bullet, nor a single solution at either an individual or societal level. It also means the solutions don’t have to look like the proximal cause that “pushed us over the edge” if it’s easier to reverse changes that happened much earlier, or if we need to do other things to overcome sources of hysteresis in our bodies’ weight-regulation systems. We have a lot of possible levers: Reducing pollution, eliminating exposure to certain chemicals, curing some infections, altering diet composition and methods of food preparation, altering timing and number of meals, altering speed and social context of eating, reducing various forms of stress, varying all the different dimensions of type and duration of exercise, changing how we sleep, changing indoor lighting and air quality, changing time spent outdoors, improving hydration, reducing chronic inflammation, and that’s just what I thought of in two minutes. It is hard to do plan and stick to enough self-experimentation over a long enough time to find out what actually works for an individual, even for very smart and educated people.