I don't know if my own anecdote will help you but I've been overweight since I was a child and I've done just about every diet under the moon. I used to hate myself and my body, a lot. I went to the gym three days a days week pushing myself hard and counted calories, and my weight wouldn't budge. I ended up developing a lot of disordered eating doing fasting and I really thought I could hate myself into being thin. When I finally found keto and it worked, I started dropping weight and I quickly lost control of my diet and started to starve myself in earnest while continuing what exercise I could. After a while all I could do was take long walks. I lost 80 pounds in 8 months doing this, and I was still considered over weight by about 60 pounds. I never got any happier with myself by changing my body. I still didn't think I was worth anything unless I could get tiny. I had really bad brain fog, I stopped being able to produce my own body heat, started to have fainting spells, and finally heart palpitations. When I went to the doctor all they told me is what a good job I was doing losing weight and that the palpitations were from my panic disorder. I finally stopped keto because my partner sat me down and begged me to stop. It was really hard and it took time to give it up, but I finally did. I had no real muscle left and I was so fatigued... Over the course of a year... I gained all the weight back. I still have palpitations sometimes, and I will never know what damage yoyo dieting for years did to me.
I don't diet anymore, I've started intuitive eating and my diet has improved over all. I eat variety now, more vegetables and lots of protein. I also have carbs, and dessert with I want it. I've also started doing things for the experience rather than to make my body look a certain and ultimately unattainable way.
I don't focus on how I look anymore, I focus on being strong. I am now highly active and doing activities I never thought I would be capable of in my fat body. I take dance classes four times a week, I lift weights, and I am starting Lyra and aerial classes. I also don't step on scales anymore. But I can tell you I haven't magically shrunk.
I guess what I'm trying to say is... Any standard of "in shape" can be impossible for any person. We aren't all meant to look that same and I think that people are caring less about being overweight because it should never have been a limiting factor to you enjoying your life, being active, and being well loved by the right people.
Don't need to go low fat OR carbs to be healthy. Restricting a whole macronutrient can help because of the effects on palatability and satiety but it's hardly required and IME is more likely to result in a worse relationship with food.
"Evil"? Trying to show a person that his mistake was starving himself when he thinks that keto was the problem is evil? Since when is pointing out mistakes that a person can use to correct himself evil?
You truly have a warped worldview.
If someone is fat his diet must be changed. There is no other way. If you belive that diet==starvation than you understand nothing about dieting.
For example, people on a good keto diet do not even remotely starve, are fully satiated (after the first 14 days that the body requires so adjust to this diet, which is an annoying period) and lose a lot of weight.
So does a lot of things, including eating disorders and living a miserable life in the first place.
From the parent's post, it's clear that dieting has done significant damage, and they got better when they stopped caring about that "Obesity leads to an early death." mantra:
> I still have palpitations sometimes, and I will never know what damage yoyo dieting for years did to me.
[...]
I don't focus on how I look anymore, I focus on being strong.
On your general stance on the subject:
> If someone is fat his diet must be changed. There is no other way.
This is a text book example of dogma. and if you really meant it, I guess there will be no amount of discussion that actually leads to anything productive on either yours or my side...
>So does a lot of things, including eating disorders and living a miserable life in the first place.
Obesity is the easiest preventable thing under your control that you can directly influence to assure that an early death does not come, you are coping and desperately trying to twist what I said.
>From the parent's post, it's clear that dieting has done significant damage
His incorrect dieting did the damage. You can drive a car well or you can drive it without a drivers license and crash in the first wall and kill yourself.
You are again conflating legit dieting with incorrect dieting.
>This is a text book example of dogma. and if you really meant it, I guess there will be no amount of discussion that actually leads to anything productive on either yours or my side...
I cannot write here what I truly wish to say in regards to this comment as it would get me banned.
There is no other way to reduce fatness other than with a diet change. You do realize that what you wrote makes no sense? How do you expect someone to lose weight without changing his diet? Unless you have a device at home capable or breaking the laws of physics, which I doubt.
Exercise is hardly of any help for fat loss.
The alternative are surgeries: but think about it: would you rather correctly adjust the food you eat or would you rather have a piece of you cut out and risking god knows what side effects of mutilating your body for having delusions of how mother nature designed the human body?
> Obesity is the easiest preventable thing under your control that you can directly influence to assure that an early death does not come, you are coping and desperately trying to twist what I said.
Obesity is not a disease, it's a condition. The distinction is important. Some disease can be caused by excessive obesity, but being obese doesn't force getting these diseases.
Here we don't know anything about someone on the internet, and there's no way for us to claim that they will have any critical disease due to their potential obesity. They might be perfectly fine for the rest of their life as they are now. Some studies actually find a longer lifespan for people lightly in the "overweight" zone.
Basically, reducing weight might not benefit everyone "overweight" person.
On the "easiest" part...living a less stressful life is also easy, and can be done by not stressing on diets...
> There is no other way to reduce fatness other than with a diet change.
My complaint is not as much on the "how" than on the "why". From the info we got, there just is no reason to reduce fatness in the first place. And then, if there were actual reasons, the solutions should be adjusted to those reasons. If it's heart diseases, there are more efficient means to prevent them (e.g. increasing exercice, or changing life habits like sleep patterns or reducing salt/adjusting water intake, etc.).
If we really care about health, there is no universal advice.
> Obesity is the easiest preventable thing under your control that you can directly influence to assure that an early death does not come, you are coping and desperately trying to twist what I said.
Do you know this from experience or are you just assuming that because controlling your weight is easy it must be for everyone?
Easiest is still as subjective as it gets. I never smoked. So, I could say not smoking is the easiest thing. I haven't drunk alcohol in years. So, also more easy than loosing weight. And so on.
Swap "easiest" for "simplest" and it's more accurate to what OP was trying to convey. Literally all you have to do is eat less, that's it. Of course, that's not easy for everyone but it sure is simple.
Stress and mental illness is as a pretty big factor in health degradation. Reducing that by just not dieting seems to me to be the simplest and easiest at the same time.
To each their own, there's a lot of ways to look at any single situation.
> Take a look at the photographic evidence of hunter-gatherers
I think this would need more development. What do you mean by "hunter-gatherers", and what photographic evidence we have.
For instance there's African societies which would fit the "hunter-gatherer" label (for instance the Akan in Ghana) and they're not all looking the same.
I don't think denial is the way to go about it if you want to live a long and healthy life. If you have been overweight since you were a kid, you have an entire lifetime worth of a bad relationship with food which needs to be looked at with the help of a professional. No temporary diet will help.
I don't diet anymore, I've started intuitive eating and my diet has improved over all. I eat variety now, more vegetables and lots of protein. I also have carbs, and dessert with I want it. I've also started doing things for the experience rather than to make my body look a certain and ultimately unattainable way. I don't focus on how I look anymore, I focus on being strong. I am now highly active and doing activities I never thought I would be capable of in my fat body. I take dance classes four times a week, I lift weights, and I am starting Lyra and aerial classes. I also don't step on scales anymore. But I can tell you I haven't magically shrunk. I guess what I'm trying to say is... Any standard of "in shape" can be impossible for any person. We aren't all meant to look that same and I think that people are caring less about being overweight because it should never have been a limiting factor to you enjoying your life, being active, and being well loved by the right people.