As someone who has struggled with my weight for a good chunk of my life, I was fascinated by this article in The New York Times in November 2022. Scientists Don’t Agree on What Causes Obesity, but They Know What Doesn’t. It should be sharable.
“That’s not to say the researchers disagreed on everything. The three-day meeting was infused with an implicit understanding of what obesity is not: a personal failing.” That messaging had been pervasive most of my life.
“No presenter argued that humans collectively lost willpower around the 1980s, when obesity rates took off, first in high-income countries, then in much of the rest of the world. Not a single scientist said our genes changed in that short time. Laziness, gluttony , and sloth were not referred to as obesity’s helpers.”
The stereotypes have been… unhelpful in getting most people to shed pounds. Yet it seems as though “well-meaning” people would offer unsolicited “advice.”
Starving doesn’t work
This piece from Mount Sinai about diets for rapid weight loss is true in my experience: “People who lose weight very quickly are much more likely to regain the weight over time than people who lose weight slowly through less drastic diet changes and physical activity. The weight loss is a bigger stress for the body, and the hormonal response to the weight loss is much stronger.”
NYT: “In stark contrast to a prevailing societal view of obesity, which assumes people have full control over their body size, they didn’t blame individuals for their condition, the same way we don’t blame people suffering from the effects of undernutrition, like stunting and wasting.
“The researchers instead referred to obesity as a complex, chronic condition, and they were meeting to get to the bottom of why humans have, collectively, grown larger over the past half-century. To that end, they shared a range of mechanisms that might explain the global obesity surge.
“And their theories, however diverse, made one thing obvious: As long as we treat obesity as a personal responsibility issue, its prevalence is unlikely to decline.” In other words, fat shaming is counterproductive.
I’m happy that there has been a degree of acceptance in fashion, even in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue starting a few years back.