Matt, one thing I didn’t see mentioned here is that anecdotally at least, your body may have different set points. It wouldn’t surprise me if you have to grind though 200, and then drop to 190 easily.
Of course, if you want to go from “normal” to “lean and muscular,” that will be a final grind and you may always struggle to stay there. I’m not sure how tall you are, so I’m unsure if you are now 5 lbs overweight, or 40. But if it’s closer to 40, you can probably break through a plateau and find another set point you’re happier with.
Very interesting article. I’m in the middle of the spectrum on food. I have to have all kinds of rules and tricks to maintain a healthy weight. There are a lot of snack foods I never buy, for example, and I eat out very rarely. I do need to actually go to bed hungry most nights if I want to lose weight. If I were just a little bit hungrier or a little bit more tempted, I would definitely gain.
I also agree on exercise. I enjoy working out and love running, but I no longer do races longer than 10K because training for them made me too hungry and I gained weight (not just muscle). I’m lucky that I like exercise—it’s great for mental and physical health, but fairly useless for weight control.
Matt’s comparison to alcohol really resonated with me because I have known alcoholics. We are clearly different on some basic chemical level. I can’t drink a whole glass of wine. It doesn’t taste good and I start feeling a migraine aura after about ten sips. Plus, I actively dislike the feeling of being drunk. It clearly feels way better to other people! I figure it’s like how some people love roller coasters, but to me they are quite awful.
I am looking forward to the new weight control medicines being in oral form and generic. I would like to take a small dose to free up my will power for other things! Plus, I’d love to do triathlons again without fear of too much hunger.
Great discussion, I am still struggling to piece it together in my head - perhaps someone can help.
1) is the ability to stop eating / take smaller portions / not snack = self control? If so, do folks who struggle with above also struggle with self control in other contexts? If not, how is the food context different from other self control contexts?
2) if it is self control, how much of it is generic vs environmental? If it’s not, what causes differences in human behavior re: food as clearly exhibited in this thread?
That’s a tricky question. It seems clear to me that some people are genetically predisposed to become alcoholics. It takes me no willpower at all to not drink to excess. I have always had unspeakably bad hangovers, and that’s more than enough to motivation. And as I’ve gotten older, like Matt, I drink very rarely, probably 1x/month.
Now, for people who do struggle with alcoholism, would you say it is “simply” a matter of self-control? What about a heroin addiction?
Food has an additional challenge that you can’t decide you will never eat food again, socialize exclusively with other people who never eat food, and avoid all situations where you may be tempted to eat. Everyone makes dozens, even hundreds of decisions about food every day. These decisions themselves sap willpower.
From my experience, about five pounds of it is self-control and the rest is your genetic set-point. So, you can lose about five pounds with will-power. If you need to lose more, you probably need medical intervention because you are flighting against evolution and biology (bigger forces than anyone’s self-control).
Kudos to Matt for this article, many of us have struggles with weight and admitting that its hard and we sometimes fail (and feel ashamed) is difficult especially for men... maybe I'm showing my age/upbringing but guys just didn't talk abut this as easily as women do (obviously Milan doesn't have this issue so maybe one of many ways the kids are smarter than my generation).
I'm in kind of a strange boat myself - I've never been obese, and my BMI was just barely overweight and sometimes normal, and yet I found myself with diabetes at a pretty young age. I know that some family members had it, but distant enough that it wasn't predetermined.
Rather, I just didn't really go to the doctor for years before that, so it wasn't caught, because nothing felt bad. Just noticed going to the bathroom more and being a bit thirsty.
How did this happen? In College, I was briefly around 200lbs but had been in the 170-180 range for years, sometimes lower. I think in retrospect it was a bad Mountain Dew habit, which I cut out after college, but perhaps it was too late by then. That, and not knowing what diabetes even was or how carbs and sugar impacted blood sugar, or really even thinking about these things. In retrospect, the problem was one of education, and lifestyle. I wasn't eating that much worse than most people - too much takeout, but not really bad in terms of quantity, and my calories tended to be in the 1500-2000 range anyways. I wasn't active enough, but I also don't smoke and only rarely drink. I cut sugar out of my drinks as well. I think it was just a mix of being not very active and having done some damage beforehand and then one day I took a test, and then had to scramble to figure out how to adapt.
I got my A1C down to the low 5.0 range pretty soon after and I hope that remission may be possible - I've radically changed my diet and lifestlye and quickly went from 180 lbs around diagnosis to near 145 lbs. I did this mostly just by cutting out bread, rice, and watching my carbs and sugars very closely, as well as getting on Metformin, which I hope to get off of sometime in the future.
I guess if there is a Slow Boring lesson, its that actually, Bloomberg was right to do the soda ban while everyone labeled that nanny statism, and that education on chronic diseases in schools needs to be a hell of a lot better than a unit or two in health class.
To try to be helpful: my dad was about the same starting weight as you and ultimately lost ~100 pounds over a couple years by going low carb. The last 20 pounds were stubborn and only came off by going full keto. Not all of it stayed off, but even with that he’s stayed under 200 for 6ish years.
For me, I gained 15-20 pounds during Covid (lexapro was a likely culprit) and have lost 10 of that over the past 4 months from kettlebells and low carb (only for 2 months).
It’s good to share what has worked - and I’m sure different strategies can work for different people. One of my friends got this surgery a couple of years ago and it has been a great success: much lower weight, no more knee problems, and clearly happier about life.
I really think weight gain is a lot like smoking in some ways: prevention is much, much better than cure. It's much easier to not be obese if you never have been obese.
To that end, I think redesigning our environment and food culture is a much better idea for addressing obesity than having doctors scold people. Why are Europeans skinnier than Americans? Because they live in walkable neighborhoods with public transit instead of driving everywhere, they eat less unhealthy food, and they don't eat mindlessly as much. I lost weight while I studied abroad in Spain because I was walking so much more and living in a culture that considers it disgusting to eat at a desk instead of a table. No one eats while doing anything other than conversing with table mates in Spain- they don't watch TV or read or work or play video games. They also eat way more vegetables, fruits, and seafood than Americans do.
I think the 3 changes I'd like to make to American society to help with obesity are:
1. Tax processed food like a VAT. The more processed steps, the higher the tax.
2. Include home ec in school again and have kids cook their own lunch like they do in Japan so they can learn how to feed themselves non-junk when they leave for college. So many people gain weight in college or right after because their parents cook for them in high school but don't force them to learn how to plan groceries and eat healthily for themselves.
3. Get a lot more transit. It's amazing how much fitter just walking between bus stops or up and down metro stairs makes people compared to driving directly between destinations.
From a personal standpoint, I just don't understand why people are unable to just skip meals, but I guess everyone's different, as someone who's been thin my whole life. On that point, I definitely think there's a hereditary component to appetite and body weight setpoint, in that thin people seem to have thin kids, and vice versa, but that's now more noticeable because environmental factors have changed. Food is more readily available and more varied, and less Americans use substances that are well-known for causing appetite suppression. Caffeine's a mild appetite suppressant, Nicotine more so, and amphetamines much more so. Amphetamines weren't even a controlled substance until 1971 with the Controlled Substances Act(it just had to be prescribed by a doctor, like Liptor or blood pressure medications today, but nobody monitored the amount dispensed or overprescribing by Dr's) and a lot of Americans were using all three of those drugs. The rise of fast food, and decline of home cooking dosen't help either, because portion control goes out the window.
Thanks for writing this. I'm sure many of us identify with your struggle.
One unimportant suggestion for people who are calorie counting. I recommend Cronometer over MyFitnessPal. The food database is better - a lot less spurious and incorrect entries - so it's easier to find and enter the things you're eating. The free version is just fine. The paid version is supposed to make it easier to enter custom recipes, but it's not that big an improvement.
I found my Fitbit to be a total game changer. The calorie entry part is more basic than MyFitnessPal or the other ones I’ve tried, but its simplicity helps me tremendously.
It's the food, stupid! All animals have intrinsic systems that prevent them from eating too little or too much -- otherwise they would die either of starvation or of obesity. Humans have these systems too, but they developed to operate with the foods that we evolved to eat. Manufactured foods that are super dense in calories and fat overwhelm these systems.
It seems like lots of people here are extremely interested in improving their health habits. Maybe we should have a weekly roundup here!
My friends and I started a support group last year, but unsurprisingly everyone lost interest after a couple months. I still write a “check-in” text every week, but I worry that it’s obnoxious given that I’m the only one who is still having any success.
Sheesh this comment thread is full of the comments that Matt clearly points out just aren't helpful. I can't help reading much of it, and then I close the tab but still find myself angry at those on here who think it's easy, "just do this one simple trick". I am more upset about this comment thread than any of the political stuff.
Empathy please folks! If losing weight was easy or simple, those who want to do it would have done it. America's relationship with food is different than many other places and times in history. Different bodies, professional, and family responsibilities complicate it all.
Ugh. How is empathy so hard? All you have to do is...
This was the Matt Yglesias take I didn’t know I wanted! I’m a small-bodied, sometimes fat, woman who has a long history of struggling with disordered eating and exercise patterns from about age 12. In recent years I have dug into diet culture critique, fat acceptance and intuitive eating. There are so many constructive arguments in these movements and my thinking about my body, self and social justice has evolved in important ways. But about a year ago I began chafing against what felt like the limits of some of that mental framing and wanting to reclaim some of the sense of agency and discipline I felt when I was fiercely regulating my food intake and exercise in eras past. I can say with 100% certainty that simply listening to my body is not the best route to health for me. I’m toward the adhd end of brain functioning - I struggle mightily with impulse control and executive function in all areas of life. Putting in systems to help me override impulses I know are unhealthy makes me healthier mentally and physically. Practicing acceptance when I can’t, and not letting negative self- talk derail me, as intuitive eating/acceptance has taught me, is also important. And I really welcome the insight developments in pharmaceuticals like GLP-1 drugs are providing into the complex science of weight gain and loss and the role of biology vs personal responsibility. But for me, embracing my own agency in weight and health in the last year has been really successful and gratifying. I have a high genetic risk for colon cancer, I’m doing IVF at “advanced maternal age,” and I have some minor health issues that are helped by reducing meat intake, eating a plant-heavy diet and getting regular exercise. And I’ve made a lot of progress moving in that direction, using tools like My Fitness Pal, a personal trainer coaching app and the mental toughness I used to leverage to starve myself or force myself to constantly work out, to push toward something a bit more balanced - not perfect - but more balanced. Still working on it!
Thank you for putting "prediabetes" in quotes, where it belongs.
Matt, one thing I didn’t see mentioned here is that anecdotally at least, your body may have different set points. It wouldn’t surprise me if you have to grind though 200, and then drop to 190 easily.
Of course, if you want to go from “normal” to “lean and muscular,” that will be a final grind and you may always struggle to stay there. I’m not sure how tall you are, so I’m unsure if you are now 5 lbs overweight, or 40. But if it’s closer to 40, you can probably break through a plateau and find another set point you’re happier with.
Very interesting article. I’m in the middle of the spectrum on food. I have to have all kinds of rules and tricks to maintain a healthy weight. There are a lot of snack foods I never buy, for example, and I eat out very rarely. I do need to actually go to bed hungry most nights if I want to lose weight. If I were just a little bit hungrier or a little bit more tempted, I would definitely gain.
I also agree on exercise. I enjoy working out and love running, but I no longer do races longer than 10K because training for them made me too hungry and I gained weight (not just muscle). I’m lucky that I like exercise—it’s great for mental and physical health, but fairly useless for weight control.
Matt’s comparison to alcohol really resonated with me because I have known alcoholics. We are clearly different on some basic chemical level. I can’t drink a whole glass of wine. It doesn’t taste good and I start feeling a migraine aura after about ten sips. Plus, I actively dislike the feeling of being drunk. It clearly feels way better to other people! I figure it’s like how some people love roller coasters, but to me they are quite awful.
I am looking forward to the new weight control medicines being in oral form and generic. I would like to take a small dose to free up my will power for other things! Plus, I’d love to do triathlons again without fear of too much hunger.
Great discussion, I am still struggling to piece it together in my head - perhaps someone can help.
1) is the ability to stop eating / take smaller portions / not snack = self control? If so, do folks who struggle with above also struggle with self control in other contexts? If not, how is the food context different from other self control contexts?
2) if it is self control, how much of it is generic vs environmental? If it’s not, what causes differences in human behavior re: food as clearly exhibited in this thread?
Thanks a lot!!!
That’s a tricky question. It seems clear to me that some people are genetically predisposed to become alcoholics. It takes me no willpower at all to not drink to excess. I have always had unspeakably bad hangovers, and that’s more than enough to motivation. And as I’ve gotten older, like Matt, I drink very rarely, probably 1x/month.
Now, for people who do struggle with alcoholism, would you say it is “simply” a matter of self-control? What about a heroin addiction?
Food has an additional challenge that you can’t decide you will never eat food again, socialize exclusively with other people who never eat food, and avoid all situations where you may be tempted to eat. Everyone makes dozens, even hundreds of decisions about food every day. These decisions themselves sap willpower.
From my experience, about five pounds of it is self-control and the rest is your genetic set-point. So, you can lose about five pounds with will-power. If you need to lose more, you probably need medical intervention because you are flighting against evolution and biology (bigger forces than anyone’s self-control).
Want to add—I mean lose it and keep it off. You could lose more than five lbs, but it would come back within five years.
Kudos to Matt for this article, many of us have struggles with weight and admitting that its hard and we sometimes fail (and feel ashamed) is difficult especially for men... maybe I'm showing my age/upbringing but guys just didn't talk abut this as easily as women do (obviously Milan doesn't have this issue so maybe one of many ways the kids are smarter than my generation).
I'm in kind of a strange boat myself - I've never been obese, and my BMI was just barely overweight and sometimes normal, and yet I found myself with diabetes at a pretty young age. I know that some family members had it, but distant enough that it wasn't predetermined.
Rather, I just didn't really go to the doctor for years before that, so it wasn't caught, because nothing felt bad. Just noticed going to the bathroom more and being a bit thirsty.
How did this happen? In College, I was briefly around 200lbs but had been in the 170-180 range for years, sometimes lower. I think in retrospect it was a bad Mountain Dew habit, which I cut out after college, but perhaps it was too late by then. That, and not knowing what diabetes even was or how carbs and sugar impacted blood sugar, or really even thinking about these things. In retrospect, the problem was one of education, and lifestyle. I wasn't eating that much worse than most people - too much takeout, but not really bad in terms of quantity, and my calories tended to be in the 1500-2000 range anyways. I wasn't active enough, but I also don't smoke and only rarely drink. I cut sugar out of my drinks as well. I think it was just a mix of being not very active and having done some damage beforehand and then one day I took a test, and then had to scramble to figure out how to adapt.
I got my A1C down to the low 5.0 range pretty soon after and I hope that remission may be possible - I've radically changed my diet and lifestlye and quickly went from 180 lbs around diagnosis to near 145 lbs. I did this mostly just by cutting out bread, rice, and watching my carbs and sugars very closely, as well as getting on Metformin, which I hope to get off of sometime in the future.
I guess if there is a Slow Boring lesson, its that actually, Bloomberg was right to do the soda ban while everyone labeled that nanny statism, and that education on chronic diseases in schools needs to be a hell of a lot better than a unit or two in health class.
To try to be helpful: my dad was about the same starting weight as you and ultimately lost ~100 pounds over a couple years by going low carb. The last 20 pounds were stubborn and only came off by going full keto. Not all of it stayed off, but even with that he’s stayed under 200 for 6ish years.
For me, I gained 15-20 pounds during Covid (lexapro was a likely culprit) and have lost 10 of that over the past 4 months from kettlebells and low carb (only for 2 months).
It’s good to share what has worked - and I’m sure different strategies can work for different people. One of my friends got this surgery a couple of years ago and it has been a great success: much lower weight, no more knee problems, and clearly happier about life.
I really think weight gain is a lot like smoking in some ways: prevention is much, much better than cure. It's much easier to not be obese if you never have been obese.
To that end, I think redesigning our environment and food culture is a much better idea for addressing obesity than having doctors scold people. Why are Europeans skinnier than Americans? Because they live in walkable neighborhoods with public transit instead of driving everywhere, they eat less unhealthy food, and they don't eat mindlessly as much. I lost weight while I studied abroad in Spain because I was walking so much more and living in a culture that considers it disgusting to eat at a desk instead of a table. No one eats while doing anything other than conversing with table mates in Spain- they don't watch TV or read or work or play video games. They also eat way more vegetables, fruits, and seafood than Americans do.
I think the 3 changes I'd like to make to American society to help with obesity are:
1. Tax processed food like a VAT. The more processed steps, the higher the tax.
2. Include home ec in school again and have kids cook their own lunch like they do in Japan so they can learn how to feed themselves non-junk when they leave for college. So many people gain weight in college or right after because their parents cook for them in high school but don't force them to learn how to plan groceries and eat healthily for themselves.
3. Get a lot more transit. It's amazing how much fitter just walking between bus stops or up and down metro stairs makes people compared to driving directly between destinations.
From a personal standpoint, I just don't understand why people are unable to just skip meals, but I guess everyone's different, as someone who's been thin my whole life. On that point, I definitely think there's a hereditary component to appetite and body weight setpoint, in that thin people seem to have thin kids, and vice versa, but that's now more noticeable because environmental factors have changed. Food is more readily available and more varied, and less Americans use substances that are well-known for causing appetite suppression. Caffeine's a mild appetite suppressant, Nicotine more so, and amphetamines much more so. Amphetamines weren't even a controlled substance until 1971 with the Controlled Substances Act(it just had to be prescribed by a doctor, like Liptor or blood pressure medications today, but nobody monitored the amount dispensed or overprescribing by Dr's) and a lot of Americans were using all three of those drugs. The rise of fast food, and decline of home cooking dosen't help either, because portion control goes out the window.
Thanks for writing this. I'm sure many of us identify with your struggle.
One unimportant suggestion for people who are calorie counting. I recommend Cronometer over MyFitnessPal. The food database is better - a lot less spurious and incorrect entries - so it's easier to find and enter the things you're eating. The free version is just fine. The paid version is supposed to make it easier to enter custom recipes, but it's not that big an improvement.
I found my Fitbit to be a total game changer. The calorie entry part is more basic than MyFitnessPal or the other ones I’ve tried, but its simplicity helps me tremendously.
It's the food, stupid! All animals have intrinsic systems that prevent them from eating too little or too much -- otherwise they would die either of starvation or of obesity. Humans have these systems too, but they developed to operate with the foods that we evolved to eat. Manufactured foods that are super dense in calories and fat overwhelm these systems.
Where are the pictures? Cant put a post like this up without before and after pictures.
I thought the ones he posted in this article were good enough.
It seems like lots of people here are extremely interested in improving their health habits. Maybe we should have a weekly roundup here!
My friends and I started a support group last year, but unsurprisingly everyone lost interest after a couple months. I still write a “check-in” text every week, but I worry that it’s obnoxious given that I’m the only one who is still having any success.
Sheesh this comment thread is full of the comments that Matt clearly points out just aren't helpful. I can't help reading much of it, and then I close the tab but still find myself angry at those on here who think it's easy, "just do this one simple trick". I am more upset about this comment thread than any of the political stuff.
Empathy please folks! If losing weight was easy or simple, those who want to do it would have done it. America's relationship with food is different than many other places and times in history. Different bodies, professional, and family responsibilities complicate it all.
Ugh. How is empathy so hard? All you have to do is...
This was the Matt Yglesias take I didn’t know I wanted! I’m a small-bodied, sometimes fat, woman who has a long history of struggling with disordered eating and exercise patterns from about age 12. In recent years I have dug into diet culture critique, fat acceptance and intuitive eating. There are so many constructive arguments in these movements and my thinking about my body, self and social justice has evolved in important ways. But about a year ago I began chafing against what felt like the limits of some of that mental framing and wanting to reclaim some of the sense of agency and discipline I felt when I was fiercely regulating my food intake and exercise in eras past. I can say with 100% certainty that simply listening to my body is not the best route to health for me. I’m toward the adhd end of brain functioning - I struggle mightily with impulse control and executive function in all areas of life. Putting in systems to help me override impulses I know are unhealthy makes me healthier mentally and physically. Practicing acceptance when I can’t, and not letting negative self- talk derail me, as intuitive eating/acceptance has taught me, is also important. And I really welcome the insight developments in pharmaceuticals like GLP-1 drugs are providing into the complex science of weight gain and loss and the role of biology vs personal responsibility. But for me, embracing my own agency in weight and health in the last year has been really successful and gratifying. I have a high genetic risk for colon cancer, I’m doing IVF at “advanced maternal age,” and I have some minor health issues that are helped by reducing meat intake, eating a plant-heavy diet and getting regular exercise. And I’ve made a lot of progress moving in that direction, using tools like My Fitness Pal, a personal trainer coaching app and the mental toughness I used to leverage to starve myself or force myself to constantly work out, to push toward something a bit more balanced - not perfect - but more balanced. Still working on it!