Three Different Kinds of Obesity
In Which I Claim that Anorexia is a Type of Obesity
There seem to be three different kinds of obesity.
Type One is the kind that I've got, which seems to be pretty common amongst middle aged men of my generation and background, where a homeostat that was working fine has suddenly gone wrong.
It's gone wrong only very slightly, and very gradually. I think I've been overeating by about 20kcals/day since I was around forty years old.
That's a minute amount.
When I've eaten enough, my hunger turns off, and I don't want any food any more. Wouldn't eat it if it was in front of me.
I don't need to play silly buggers with food, I can fill my fridge and cupboards with delicious things. I just eat when I'm hungry, and otherwise never think about the stuff. Any kind of food is fine.
My homeostat is clearly still in good working order, it's just ever so slightly miscalibrated.
Or maybe not.
I'm carrying about 10kg of fat that I don't want. Maybe more. I'm an old man now, and I don't have the muscle that I used to have, so 85kg probably isn't my best weight any more. Old men should weigh less as their muscles waste.
And that's a lot. A man should carry about 10kg fat in total.
My fat reserves are probably more than 200% of what they should be.
That's a lot.
It's possible that my appetite is just ever so slighly miscalibrated, or it's possible that whatever mechanism senses the amount of fat I've got is out by a fuckton. Literally measuring 20% fat as 10% fat, and thinking it's keeping me at the right weight by keeping that measurement constant.
And that vast miscalibration has come on ever so slowly, over the last fifteen or so years.
Type Two is the sort of obesity that many young Americans seem to be suffering from.
A constant raging hunger that will never go away. Always eat until you're so full that you literally physically can't eat any more, and still be hungry.
That’s how I feel about cigars. If I’ve got cigars, they get smoked. One every couple of hours until there aren’t any more. And if there’s anything willpower depleting going on, like I’m sad, or stressed, or drunk, then they go much faster than that!
Luckily if you stop smoking, the cravings quickly go away. With food, I’d imagine it’s the opposite. The less you eat, the hungrier you are, until it’s a raging obsession.
That's what my friends u/exfatloss and Leo Abstract report, and by asking around here, in England, and on the r/SaturatedFat subreddit, I've found that a lot of people these days are feeling like that.
I can just about imagine what's that's like.
Imagine your fat sensor is even more buggered than mine. Imagine it always reads 0%, whatever the true amount of fat you're carrying is.
You're always hungry. Terribly hungry. As hungry as you would be if you were a famine victim on the point of death.
Your system is screaming that you must eat, right now, or you will die.
Not eating in such circumstances used to be something that religious lunatics did, or people deliberately starving themselves to death for political reasons.
We used to laud those people, as almost superhuman in will.
Mohandas Gandhi, simply by giving up chives, forced the submission of the greatest Empire the world has ever known.
Now we require that superhuman will of ordinary fatties.
Eat less, we say. Exercise more.
And I think that there must be a third type of Obesity.
In this one, the fat sensor is buggered the other way. It over-reads.
Imagine you're a young girl. You're painfully thin. Maybe that's even cool. Everyone wants to look like Kate Moss, right?
But it's not good for you. You know that. Your parents worry. They want you to eat more. You maybe want to want to eat more. But you don't want to eat more.
Your second order desires are nothing to your fundamental motivational systems.
We are already at 20% fat, your systems say. No more food for us. We'll grow overweight. No famine in the history of humans is enough to more than inconvenience us. Any more food and we'll grow slow and vulnerable. We won't be able to run away from scary things.
So you try to eat, but it's a chore. Nothing tastes good. It's like eating cardboard.
You start deceiving your well-meaning friends and relatives. Hiding your food when they're not looking. Pretending you ate earlier. Maybe eating it all up and then going and vomiting somewhere.
That’s what I would do, if I was being constantly being cajoled and bullied into eating more than I wanted to eat until the very thought of food was revolting.
Psychologists get involved. Young women are mental, they say. They see all these pictures and they want to be like the women in the pictures.
Has she got a brother? They say, meaningfully. Any trauma? Any issues?
You aren't menstruating any more.
Some bit of you has realized that there just aren't the energy reserves to have a baby and feed it, so the option has closed off in order to save your life.
You are starving. But the system that controls your appetite is perfectly happy. 20% fat, it says. Bang nominal. Nothing to see here.
The Lord knows that I am a wretched old unreconstructed sexist dinosaur from the past, and I can and do believe that women are a bit mental.
But they're not that mental. Not outside of lunatic asylums they're not.
Sensor's broken.
Slime Mold Time Mold have the theory that the rise in anorexia (mostly in young women) is an adverse reaction to whatever's causing the obesity epidemic. So basically same theory.
> Imagine your fat sensor is even more buggered than mine. Imagine it always reads 0%, whatever the true amount of fat you're carrying is.
I don't think the sensor measures absolute amounts. There is on system in the body that takes a census of "total fat cells and their current contents" and I don't think such a mechanism exists for anything else in the body.
I suspect the sensor measures fat flux, or even "available energy" flux. In a metabolically healthy person, fat flux corresponds to available fat, because lipolysis constantly causes FFA release from your adipose tissue unless you JUST stuffed yourself. A few hours later, glucose and FFAs from intake are put to good use (either to build stuff, to burn, or stored in adipose tissue) and lipolysis starts up again.
But if this fat flux from adipose tissue is somehow not sending the right signal, e.g. by not "burning cleanly" in the mitochondria...
Ah, another trio of posts on one of my favorite topics. Couple of quibbles with this one:
Your second type invited recollection of the various men I've known who have complained of excessive appetite. None of us have ever been obese -- all unusually large and strong with a tendency to add some flab around the midsection during periods of depression.. Generally, people who see me eat are shocked that I'm not fat. Perhaps my thermostat wasn't really that off, given the PUFAs and emulsifiers in my diet,.
Your discussion of anorexia is a bit wide of the mark, though. It's an odd thing and is practically a field of study unto itself now that you can't be expected to know. Here are a couple of tidbits. One way to look at it is as an addiction to being hungry. Anorexics are, like addicts, notorious liars, and one saying she isn't hungry doesn't mean any more than an addict saying that no of course he isn't high. After recorvery, or in moments of clarity, they'll admit to enjoying the experience of being underfed - sometimes in a "yay, this feeling means I'm losing weight!" (a direct quote from an anorexic) or with a sense of energetic well-being (which I'll address momentarily). The first of these, studies show, is dopaminergic: minimizing food intake becomes more strongly the target for some rare few neural systems, bringing a feeling of success. It's a contest against the food, against the prying eyes of one's parents, against one's body, etc. It's exciting and motivating (but I already said dopamine, so I repeat myself). The second of these relates to an odd quirk of mammalian metabolism, where an animal that is approaching starvation suddenly experiences a burst of energy. The hypothesized purpose of this is to motivate the animal to leave whatever food-poor region it is in and seek out greener fields afar. The anorexic is one who learns to surf this wave of energy as long as it lasts (before suffering through a period of low-energy, usually marked by isolating and watching tiktok videos or whatever). Finally, for those adapted to fasting (as anorexics certainly are), eating anything at all is unpleasant. Especially if one were riding that starvation wave at the time. As a practitioner of intermittent fasting for approaching a decade, I find that I can cruise all day without food, feeling light and clear-headed and energetic. Eating triggers the rest-and-digest response. Anorexics are hit even harder by eating, especially since their stomachs have shrunk.
So far, I've just been regurgitating (something of a bulimia joke) the scientific consensus on anorexia. Here's an additional theory of my own: it's HPFs, too: highly processed foods. Anyone who wants to feel healthy would benefit from keeping (even quite informally) a food/energy journal, which tracks how various foods make you feel. You've done that, which is how you eliminated sulfites. Most people, especially most young people, don't. But some of us are more sensitive to changes in how we feel than others, especially food-related changes (a well-studied example of what they call one-trial learning is where you eat some food, get sick [coincidentally or not], and then can't eat that food again for years or perhaps ever). Anorexics often begin by eliminating specific foods from their diets, starting with heavy, rich, inflammatory, or hard-to-digest foods (for instance, good luck finding an anorexic teenage girl who has enjoyed a chicken-fried beef steak lately or indeed at all). Because in a standard household these days, a preponderance of calories come from processed foods, eliminating everything that makes a sensitive person feel bad when she eats it leaves only plain greek yogurt, leafy green vegetables without [sulfite-and-emulsifier-heavy] bottled dressings, and a little bit of fruit and almonds.
I'd dare say that nobody raised on a diet of abundant fish, fruit,' green vegetables, rice, and sweet potatoes would end up anorexic.