Hi. In today's episode, Katy Stoll looks at America's obsession with weight, how social media has made this obsession worse, and how we can be more empatheti...
So here’s the thing, I don’t really face these sorts of people IRL. Or even this sort of thinking, much. But I do run into the incomplete thinking about calories. To which I try to give a short and straightforward answer. Losing weight is Calories and Calories out, but not all Calories are the same. There are calories that are unfulfilling. There are Calories that are addictive. There are Calories that make you sick. You wouldn’t go on a diet to lose weight and improve your health by counting 1500 calories of whisky every day because that’d be insane.
From then on you can open the discussion towards all the other pitfalls of modern diet. Soft, white bread. Fruit juice. Mayonnaise, other industrialized sauces. And so on. Eventually you can work all the way to recognizing ultra processed food for what it is. It’s not food, it’s industrialized edible substances meant make you addicted.
That said, I do have a personal experience with being a bigot myself. I’ve lost weight twice in my life. Once currently. The first time was nearly ten years ago. I did so mostly for aesthetics, I was young and healthy at the time. And I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. I went to a nutritionist, got their input, adapted it a bit to my tastes and just ate smaller portions while doing increasingly more intense water workouts on my own. This allowed me to lose about 30 kilos and improved my life considerably. Then, for health reasons, I could no longer exercise. I had to go through surgery and that sent me on a depressive spiral where I regained that weight and some more over the course of the decade.
Here’s the thing though, I believed that my primary motivator was the chaining of exercise and dieting with one another. If I exercise that morning, then I’ve got too much sunk investment not to eat less over the day. But there were other more toxic behaviors that kept me on the game. I browsed the subreddit fatlogic every single day, just so I could feel superior to these caricatures of people who really are victims not only of their own decisions, but of the food environment they exist in. Cardboard cutouts of fat activists and addicted people meant to be raged at, gawked at. Once I could no longer exercise I became human again. I could no longer gawk at anyone. I was just another sick person in this sick world.
Today I’ve lost 35 kilos, there’s still a few ways more I wish to go. My exercises are much milder. I’ve learned how to cook. I’ve learned all the there was to reasonably learn about metabolic pathways and hyper processed food. I do exercise by walking around my neighborhood, which is pleasing in itself (it’s not the nicest place but it’s home). My diet is focused on my daily well being, so while I do count calories the key thing I do is that I practice fasting because it does make me feel better. Overall, I think I’ve entered a much more conscious path to self improvement that has rendered me completely disgusted at the subreddit. I can’t really read it anymore. It’s not just because I don’t need it. It’s because it runs counter to the person I’ve become after struggling with the food addiction, having a ‘fall from grace’, and now entering a much surer phase of the struggle that truly approaches a sustained victory.
At the end of the day CICO is like finding a lifeboat. It’s not unimportant, it’s you surviving in the storm. But when it comes to the poisoning of our food supply, CICO is not enough. What you need is solidarity. What you need is to save the ship from sinking with the rest of the crew in it. And Solidarity is all about policy, looking after society, and really just treating people not as things but as people. Confronting their issues, but always extending a hand. There’s no such thing as cruel kindness, just as there’s no such thing as pure niceness. You’re either kind or you’re not.
The thing about the constant hunger is that it’s learned. Hyperprocessed foods make you more hungry, all the time. Everyone knows about insulin resistance, well if you’ve got that you probably also have leptin resistance. Which means the hormonal feedback loops that make you satiated are suppressed by fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes.
Then there’s the mechanical side of things. A diet based on hyper processed foods is poor in fiber, which not only means your digestion happens too quickly, but the impact of the incoming nutrients (read: sugar) into your bloodstream is that much more severe. Fibers form a protective layer in your gut and feed its bacteria. Without it you have neither.
Then there’s depression that flows from the excessive dopamine feedbacks into your brain, the re-wiring of your brain to actually enjoy artificial sweeteners, the growth of your stomach, the cultural aspect of losing out on cooking as a human experience and snacking all the time. There’s two dozen different ways you can analyze the effects of these foodstuffs and they aren’t just bad, they all compound on each other.
Of course, the social stigma associated with being fat doesn’t help. And once you’re up there, neither do the diseases associated with excessive weight. I’ve had more than one person die in my family after giving up on their lives because they couldn’t walk any more, ‘anyways’.
Going keto, or vegan, or fasting, doing the mediterranean diet, and so on. All of these methods always go back to the same thing. Cooking and rejecting hyper processed foods. You can’t go keto on stuff like sausage because it has carbs in it. Vegans at most eat hummus, not some fast food franken dip. And if there’s one thing that fasting does is break the ‘digesting literal garbage all the time’ effect. CICO is so much easier to do and much more reasonable once you aren’t hungry for - and I harp on this because apparently its the academic term - industrialized edible substances all the time.
I think the great struggle against the food industry is long in the making. It will be like cigs all over again. There will be a thousand quack studies and, I’m sure of it, astroturfed social media movements all about discrediting the mounting evidence against hyper processed foods. The worst thing is, they are totally gonna use environmentalism to sell hyperprocessed fake meat rather than just support a transition to eating beans more often than not.
So here’s the thing, I don’t really face these sorts of people IRL. Or even this sort of thinking, much. But I do run into the incomplete thinking about calories. To which I try to give a short and straightforward answer. Losing weight is Calories and Calories out, but not all Calories are the same. There are calories that are unfulfilling. There are Calories that are addictive. There are Calories that make you sick. You wouldn’t go on a diet to lose weight and improve your health by counting 1500 calories of whisky every day because that’d be insane.
From then on you can open the discussion towards all the other pitfalls of modern diet. Soft, white bread. Fruit juice. Mayonnaise, other industrialized sauces. And so on. Eventually you can work all the way to recognizing ultra processed food for what it is. It’s not food, it’s industrialized edible substances meant make you addicted.
That said, I do have a personal experience with being a bigot myself. I’ve lost weight twice in my life. Once currently. The first time was nearly ten years ago. I did so mostly for aesthetics, I was young and healthy at the time. And I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. I went to a nutritionist, got their input, adapted it a bit to my tastes and just ate smaller portions while doing increasingly more intense water workouts on my own. This allowed me to lose about 30 kilos and improved my life considerably. Then, for health reasons, I could no longer exercise. I had to go through surgery and that sent me on a depressive spiral where I regained that weight and some more over the course of the decade.
Here’s the thing though, I believed that my primary motivator was the chaining of exercise and dieting with one another. If I exercise that morning, then I’ve got too much sunk investment not to eat less over the day. But there were other more toxic behaviors that kept me on the game. I browsed the subreddit fatlogic every single day, just so I could feel superior to these caricatures of people who really are victims not only of their own decisions, but of the food environment they exist in. Cardboard cutouts of fat activists and addicted people meant to be raged at, gawked at. Once I could no longer exercise I became human again. I could no longer gawk at anyone. I was just another sick person in this sick world.
Today I’ve lost 35 kilos, there’s still a few ways more I wish to go. My exercises are much milder. I’ve learned how to cook. I’ve learned all the there was to reasonably learn about metabolic pathways and hyper processed food. I do exercise by walking around my neighborhood, which is pleasing in itself (it’s not the nicest place but it’s home). My diet is focused on my daily well being, so while I do count calories the key thing I do is that I practice fasting because it does make me feel better. Overall, I think I’ve entered a much more conscious path to self improvement that has rendered me completely disgusted at the subreddit. I can’t really read it anymore. It’s not just because I don’t need it. It’s because it runs counter to the person I’ve become after struggling with the food addiction, having a ‘fall from grace’, and now entering a much surer phase of the struggle that truly approaches a sustained victory.
At the end of the day CICO is like finding a lifeboat. It’s not unimportant, it’s you surviving in the storm. But when it comes to the poisoning of our food supply, CICO is not enough. What you need is solidarity. What you need is to save the ship from sinking with the rest of the crew in it. And Solidarity is all about policy, looking after society, and really just treating people not as things but as people. Confronting their issues, but always extending a hand. There’s no such thing as cruel kindness, just as there’s no such thing as pure niceness. You’re either kind or you’re not.
now, twinkies on the other hand…
cico is correct and works, but the hard part is sticking with it and handling the pain and stress of constant hunger, especially in capitalist society
The thing about the constant hunger is that it’s learned. Hyperprocessed foods make you more hungry, all the time. Everyone knows about insulin resistance, well if you’ve got that you probably also have leptin resistance. Which means the hormonal feedback loops that make you satiated are suppressed by fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes.
Then there’s the mechanical side of things. A diet based on hyper processed foods is poor in fiber, which not only means your digestion happens too quickly, but the impact of the incoming nutrients (read: sugar) into your bloodstream is that much more severe. Fibers form a protective layer in your gut and feed its bacteria. Without it you have neither.
Then there’s depression that flows from the excessive dopamine feedbacks into your brain, the re-wiring of your brain to actually enjoy artificial sweeteners, the growth of your stomach, the cultural aspect of losing out on cooking as a human experience and snacking all the time. There’s two dozen different ways you can analyze the effects of these foodstuffs and they aren’t just bad, they all compound on each other.
Of course, the social stigma associated with being fat doesn’t help. And once you’re up there, neither do the diseases associated with excessive weight. I’ve had more than one person die in my family after giving up on their lives because they couldn’t walk any more, ‘anyways’.
Going keto, or vegan, or fasting, doing the mediterranean diet, and so on. All of these methods always go back to the same thing. Cooking and rejecting hyper processed foods. You can’t go keto on stuff like sausage because it has carbs in it. Vegans at most eat hummus, not some fast food franken dip. And if there’s one thing that fasting does is break the ‘digesting literal garbage all the time’ effect. CICO is so much easier to do and much more reasonable once you aren’t hungry for - and I harp on this because apparently its the academic term - industrialized edible substances all the time.
I think the great struggle against the food industry is long in the making. It will be like cigs all over again. There will be a thousand quack studies and, I’m sure of it, astroturfed social media movements all about discrediting the mounting evidence against hyper processed foods. The worst thing is, they are totally gonna use environmentalism to sell hyperprocessed fake meat rather than just support a transition to eating beans more often than not.