Calories In, Calories Out

Somehow I am confusing people

u/Gamer_Imp on r/slatestarcodex said:

I'd be more inclined to use my own anecdotal experience to agree with your own- I am and was a slothful glutton, and have always been thin-to-healthy weights. However, I've also seen how obese people eat when they aren't trying to present normal eating behaviors to others- they eat far past where I'd stop, they'd eat whole meals between meals, get up in the night to make a meal, etc.

In general, we find that "CICO" style interventions work under heavy medical control / isolation, so that diet can be enforced. It doesn't work "in the field" because people just eat more. Sometimes they mis-estimate their calorie intake, sometimes they lie, sometimes they "eat in a fugue" and don't really notice how much they are consuming, etc., but they eat.

I agree this leaves the mystery of why obesity rates have risen so much in the modern world, but I think it shifts the burden onto appetite- why are *appetites* so much stronger on average in the modern world? That could still be diet/poison/strange-chemical related.

I think he thought he was somehow disagreeing with me, but we’re on the same page here.

My reply was:

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I think we're in absolute agreement!

CICO is a tautology, pace a couple of little quibbles. Good enough anyway.

My experience is that an exquisitely balanced homeostat that worked all my adult life to keep me at 85kg whatever I did, stopped working when I was about forty years old; but it's only slightly out, to the tune of 20kcal/day, a minute amount.

Over the years that adds up! 20kcal/day x 365 x 13=95000kcal.

And 95000kcals is 13kilos of fat!

That's my obesity problem in a nutshell, and of course I'm back-calculating. The only reason I think my homeostat is out 20kcal/day is because I've mysteriously added 13kg over the last 13 years. Calories in, calories out.

But my homeostat is still working fine apart from the slight miscalibration. When I eat, I eat what my body thinks it needs, then get bored and stop. Doesn't need willpower. The idea of eating any more is rather revolting.

I think the miscalibration is getting worse as I get older though.

Recently, from talking to various lumps of lard, I've realised that that's not what obesity is like for the kind of horrifyingly obese people that you only used to get in America, and that you're now starting to get all over the world.

For them, there's no homeostat. They're just always hungry. They treat food like I treat cigars. If they're in the house I'll smoke them and I can't resist the urge with any reasonable exercise of will.

A commenter recently used the phrase "A single gallon of ice-cream contains..."

A single gallon! As if, when peckish, a second gallon might hit the spot. I can't do that. I couldn't force myself to do that without a gun pointing at my head.

I have a close personal friend who says she's literally never felt satiety in my sense. She's my height and weighs more than me. The only reason she's not a barrage balloon is that she's spent her whole life in a constant battle to keep herself in a state of starvation. She thinks she spends at least two hours a day thinking about food, resisting the urge to eat.

I think that's fundamentally broken. Animals shouldn't work like that. Any tendency to work like that would have been selected out very fast.

My questions are things like:

• What on earth is causing that?

• Is what has happened to me just an early version of what's happened to them?

• How do we fix it?