If you just teleport a fat guy from Bentonville to Manhattan and give him a Metrocard he will lose a pound a week. The people who say nobody can lose weight, it's too hard, cannot explain why there are macroscale populations with lower obesity.
"It's too hard" includes "It's too hard to just magically change the environmental factors making it difficult for this specific person". We can't just magically move every obese person to NYC, and unwalkable car-dependent infrastructure cannot be fixed overnight either, even if the people living there all decided to vote for politicians who would legitimately work towards making that happen (still seems unlikely). Unless and until we work towards fixing the societal problems that created the obesity crisis in the first place, we still need short term solutions for the next couple decades at least.
Those same populations are gaining weight at a trajectory that is behind the US but still headed the same direction. AFAIK most western European nations have a majority of people overweight, with 20-25% obese. This is less than the US (though it's very regional within the US), but you don't get to brag about a 1-in-4 obesity rate.
>This is less than the US (though it's very regional within the US), but you don't get to brag about a 1-in-4 obesity rate.
Are you sure?
>In 2023, over 35 percent of adults in the Netherlands were classed as overweight, meaning they had a body mass index (BMI)of between 25 and 30. Furthermore, just under 16 percent of adults were obese
>47 percent of French adults were overweight, of which 17 percent suffered from obesity
>49% of the Belgian population has overweight, of which 18% have obesity.
>Spain: 43% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight and 16% were living with obesity
>46.6% of women and 60.5% of men in Germany are affected by overweight (including obesity). Nearly one-fifth of adults (19%) have obesity.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will take your numbers as truth and run with it.
Are you arguing that 1:5 is good, but 1:4 is bad?
The only large populations of people in the world that aren't quite fat are southeast Asians. And this is fairly accurate whether they leave in southeast Asia or in the US or western Europe. Not 1:5, closer to 1:20 or in one case 1:50.
Even then, southeast Asian obesity rates are climbing. The US may have led the pack because of a consistently high standard of living, but I don't see any indication that there are macroscale populations anywhere in the world keeping the disease at bay.
Surely you have a study to support this? Or are we just speculating. The problem with this particular area is that it's not intuitive, and relying on "common sense" guidance is why everyone got fat in the first place.
Generally here if you make a claim it's totally fair to be asked to substantiate it. I already provided the evidence that this individual was wrong, so I'm looking to see why they think otherwise. Maybe they'll teach me something new.
> Generally here if you make a claim it's totally fair to be asked to substantiate it.
Anything is fair. It is a discussion forum. You can say whatever the hell you want. But it is equally nonsensical.
> so I'm looking to see why they think otherwise.
You looked for someone else – someone who prepared a study – to tell you why it might be otherwise. But if you want to talk to someone else, go talk to that someone else. If you want to come here, be happy with the people who are here. They might actually teach you something without having to defer to random other people.
Questioning the person who made the claim, sure. Get them to elaborate. That improves the discussion. But halting discussion until they can come up with the words of someone else to justify their claim, as seen here, just makes you look stupid. If you would rather talk to someone else, go talk to someone else instead. At the end of the day, all is fair in discussion, so go for it – call for someone else to enter the discussion if you want. But as all is fair, we're also going to call out your stupidity when you do.
The bit that you're (intentionally?) missing is that this is just a polite way of saying "you're full of shit". The only person being stupid here is the person making strong empirical claims without qualifying them or providing supporting evidence.
I could see a reasonable complaint that asking for studies is being passive-aggressive, but it's the sort of passive-aggressive that both helps keep the discussion more civil and leaves room to actually substantiate the original claims (that is, it's actively better for keeping the discussion going!). Just saying "lol, no, wrong" kills the discussion far more than talking about (lack of) evidence.
> The bit that you're (intentionally?) missing is that this is just a polite way of saying "you're full of shit".
If someone is full of shit, and assuming you care, then logically you would put in the effort to fix their misunderstanding, not tell them off. Exclaiming that someone is "full of shit", politely or not, is stupid. If you don't care, then why not own it? Don't care.
> The only person being stupid here is the person making strong empirical claims without qualifying them or providing supporting evidence.
There can be more than one stupid party involved.
> I could see a reasonable complaint that asking for studies is being passive-aggressive
It is just straight up nonsensical. I get that is was only ever a silly meme and always understood to be nonsensical, but a meme that has become quite tired. It was funny 20 years ago, perhaps, but at this point it is time to lay it to rest. I mean, anything goes in discussion. If you still think it is edgy, go for it. But the rest of us will still think it is stupid.
Realistically this treatment is just not available to most people (for the simple reason that there are way too few non-car-dependent cities in the US, and the ones that there are are super expensive). But GLP1 agonists are available to most people.
If you just teleport a fat guy from Bentonville to Manhattan and give him a Metrocard he will lose a pound a week. The people who say nobody can lose weight, it's too hard, cannot explain why there are macroscale populations with lower obesity.