How about this: Ask anyone who doesn’t have either problem, which they would rather have? A situation where there exists not enough food or a situation where there is too much. If these problems are equally severe, then there should be no difference. Is that what you think would actually happen?
Babies who starve don’t get old enough to get anorexia or obesity.
Or they can suffer developmental problems that are severe enough to dwarf any such concerns.
To refresh your memory, here is what your argument actually was:
How is that relevant to what we’re talking about. Which, to remind you, was this:
Additional reminder: There is nothing about anorexia in this post.
Once again, I don’t know why you’re talking about anorexia. The post I objected to made no mention of it. Here it is yet again, to help you remember:
Starvation is an always fatal condition almost always caused by a shortage of food.
Anorexia is a mental health condition which can be fatal if not treated in time. It affects way fewer people worldwide than starvation.
This is an expert goal post shift.
Anorexia has nothing to do with an “environment with easy to get excess calories”. Anorexics would be anorexic even if you threw them on a farm with no processed food around. It is a mental disorder.
What she said would be more applicable to Bulimia.
Yeah, that would be more understandable.
Here’s what she is asking us to believe:
zara: Food intake regulation in an environment with easy to get excess calories is no less a problem than starving.
Melk: Interesting, what food intake regulation problem are you talking about
zara: Anorexia, obviously
I kind of assumed everyone knew that. Who knew stating the obvious was so important?
Was that really unknown to you?
Look, this is a strong effort and all, but literally no one is going to read this:
and “clearly” assume you are talking about anorexia.
I’m going to assume you know what “clearly” means, but maybe I shouldn’t.
Edit: using the unreliable search function on Unstuck it seems that the first mention of anorexia in this thread is only after this post, which makes your claim of “clearly” even more suspect. Did you or anyone mention the word anorexia prior to that post?
Even more perplexing is your claim that in that sentence, the word “starving” is NOT the part intended to refer to anorexia.
Yeah an endocrine disorder. The weight isn’t even the worst part and I learned how to manage it (mostly). My maintenance calories come in 20% to 30% lower than models predict so I eat a lot of low-calorie foods instead of doing tiny portions. For instance, I’m having a large sliced cucumber with 2 tbsp of hummus for lunch today. Very few sugars and starches in my diet, just vegetables, good fats (nuts, oil), lean meats, and a small amount of fruit. I don’t have any psychological issues with food where I crave it or anything like that.
Oh good another thread arguing semantics with a non-native speaker. It’s always a good sign when 12 posts in a row are just two people going back and forth.
Depends on how you define "semantics ".
The CICO “model” is so glib. Imagine providing that in, say, business as an explanation of profitability.
Q: So how do you run a profitable company?
A: Simple: it’s just dollars in, dollars out. You need to take in more dollars than you send out.
Q: I have some more detailed questions about the taking in and sending out parts…
A: No. No more questions.
Sometimes it is!
I don’t know. Neurotransmitter names and organelles are thrown around like buzzwords, but real behavior/brain modeling is more amenable to worms and maybe insects. Like simple models of the visual system have hundreds of areas with complex interrelationships and many different neurotransmitters. Sure, you can give people meth and they will eat less and lose weight, and you can say that’s due to dopamine and norepinephrine, but that’s like killing a bug with a bomb, the proximate cause of its demise is overdetermined.
It’s far more widespread than you’re implying and pitched by academics, doctors, and celebrity fitness gurus, among others. The underlying truth of it isn’t the problem I have. If people are mistaken about how energy balance works, then that needs to be corrected. I don’t feel like they struggle with that concept though; they are simply framing their confusion and frustration in a way that is self-serving. They aren’t actually submitting a challenge paper on thermodynamics–they’re crying for help. The advice they are given is almost always terrible and incomplete. For instance, Jillian Michaels has had for more influence in this domain than people who actually know what they’re doing. It’s about the least surprising thing ever that YTF followed the same trajectory as The Biggest Loser contestants, losing a lot rapidly then gaining almost all of it back.
There’s a thread going on weight loss / obesity and the whys and hows. I suggest moving this over there.
I don’t recall that specifically but it’s a huge thread. I do remember him speculating early on that it was genetic or an underlying health condition and suspect he was correct about that to some degree.
Right. Like while I don’t think obesity is healthy and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise, alcoholism and other addiction isn’t healthy either and the solution is extremely well known (stop or moderate your use of the substance), we still manage to respond with compassion to addicts who struggle to do this. Yet even though the solution to obesity is far less obvious (CICO is nowhere near the full story) a lot of people on the left are still somehow convinced the problem is BOOTSTRAPS and that fat people who can’t lose weight are just lazy people. We avoided this with alcoholism by pathologizing it - like NORMAL people can always control themselves in all circumstances, but because addicts have a disease of the mind, they can’t. It’s blindingly obvious if you look at humanity that addiction is merely a special case of incomplete self-control that everyone suffers from in one way or another. We just don’t want to acknowledge that none of us are as in control of our behaviour as we like to think. I personally have issues with drinking and procrastination, among other things. Even if it were as simple as CICO, the fact that I don’t struggle with overeating is not because I’m awesome, it’s just because my brain is not wired that way. I’ve been on and off antidepressants a couple times and reliably stacked on like 10kg each time. Can giving brain chemistry a poke turn me into a lazier person? If my level of “laziness” is a consequence of my brain chemistry, in what sense am I responsible for this?
The problem here is that we imagine that some functions of the brain have moral valence and others don’t. I will spank most of the population at doing maths in my head but that isn’t held to make me a better person. I don’t go around telling people they need to just try harder at it. However if someone is better at maintaining focus and discipline than I am, that makes me an inferior person, even though it is manifestly obvious that this difference is also in the structure and chemistry of the brain - otherwise we wouldn’t have a situation where some people get addicted to alcohol and some are lifelong drinkers and never do.
The popular view of free will falls apart as soon as you look at it at all critically. Imagine trying to explain it to an alien. You’d be like “yes, you see I have free will, what happens is that I have intentions and they translate into behaviour. At least that’s what often happens, but sometimes I experience internal conflict concerning my intentions. When that happens I can’t really predict in advance how I will behave, sometimes I behave in accordance with my intentions and sometimes not”. The alien would diagnose you as suffering from a delusion that your intentions are what ultimately command your behaviour.