Curation and promotion, even if done by a machine (LOL, why does that matter at all?) needs to come with significant liability.
It should be possible to protect content hosting services from extensive liability while not protecting companies from the consequences of what they choose to promote and present to people. Those are two separate and very different activities that aren't even necessarily connected (you could curate and promote without hosting, and in fact this happens all the time; you can host without curating and promoting, this also happens all the time—in fact, these typically are not mixed together outside of social media companies with their damned "algorithms", as far as content from 3rd parties goes)
I averaged 4,000+ calories per day in high school through the first couple years of college. Almost all junk food—pizza, chips, crackers, eggo waffles, french fries, that kind of thing. Enormous amounts of soda. Milk shakes. Cappuchinos and mochas, in the later years.
All I did for activity was ride bikes some and lift weights a little, plus usual kid stuff, no serious sports or training.
I had visible ab muscles and would get a full-on six pack if I did e.g. a lot of swimming in a week. During those times I'd have relatives concerned I was sick or something, my face would get so gaunt.
Metabolisms are weird. HGH and T are basically magic I guess? I truly have no idea where all that energy was going. Must have been mostly coming out the other end unprocessed, I suppose, or else somehow used up by my gut biome. Can't figure any other way.
> I truly have no idea where all that energy was going.
Growing your body. I was the same in my late teens and early 20's. Family called it the POW Aesthetic. 6'1" & 150lbs, couldn't put an lb more on. I was strong as shit though, in a practical sense. No issue throwing 100lb feed bags over a shoulder and walking it up some stairs into storage, things like that. I was both doing active things all the time, and finishing growing my body. The summer I got my last growth spurt was agony, my bones hurt every night and I was a bottomless void of hunger.
Also, do not underestimate this bit:
> All I did for activity was ride bikes some and lift weights a little, plus usual kid stuff, no serious sports or training.
Specifically I believe the "usual kid stuff" part was doing a lot for you, I know it was for me. Looking back I now realize that my "usual kid stuff" was me being very, very active. I was pounding out 20k+ steps a day just moving around the family farm, miles on a bike (often on grass too), and then maybe an hour of pick-up soccer in the evening. This was just normal activity for me back then, I would not have considered any of it Intentional Exercise. Today I'd have to intentionally train for an ironman to even start approaching that level of activity.
I gained 15lbs the _summer_ I got my first desk job, that was entirely because I replaced 8 hours of walking around and doing things with 8 hours of sitting in a chair, and about 30 minutes of walking for breaks and lunch.
On an individual level, yes, "try harder" is all we personally can do (well, until GLP-1 agonists, LOL). So, sure, it's "good advice" in that it's all there is.
On a policy level? As far as medical intervention efficacy? It's entirely useless. Even crazy-expensive interventions involving several hours of professionals' time per week, for months on end, are wildly less effective than one might think.
What does work? Changing environment! Just ("just", lol) move to a skinnier country. You'll probably lose weight. Conversely, if people from there move to the US, they'll probably get fatter. That is, willpower and accountability and all that are not why certain populations are skinnier than others. Environment, which likely encompasses tons of factors that'd be incredibly expensive and take decades to change, seems to be it.
> Your claim that "trying harder" is "akin to insanity" is such an overreaction that it's misleading exaggeration, not worthy of further dissection.
"Akin to insanity" in the sense that nobody who's aware of research on the topic thinks it can work over a population... I mean, yes, very much so.
It's hard to wrap your head around that when you got fit working out. They will firmly believe that obesity will be solved by people working out and having a stricter diet. I took me years to understand that it's doesn't work for an entire population. Honestly, even if that happened (everybody started working out), people would have a lot of problems with body image, as we can see in teenagers boys nowadays.
Dieting and working out definitely does work, the problem is that the median person attempting it will badly yo-yo over the years while feeling terrible about themselves and probably not really getting that much healthier over the long term. So it does work, but it also doesn't, practically at all, for the overwhelming majority of people who attempt it. That's why a lot of these posts end up having people talking (well, writing) past each other: diet and exercise does work. It works great. It's also a miserable failure that's nearly useless.
Again, even those with extensive and expensive outside support see depressingly poor outcomes on average, though of course that does improve things somewhat. Those are still a ton worse than GLP-1 agonists, as far as efficacy. And that's the very best effort we've got for "diet and exercise" interventions, short of live-in dietitians and chefs and personal trainers or putting people in total institutions.
Meanwhile, people move from a skinnier country to a fatter one and usually get fatter. Willpower wasn't what was keeping them skinnier. It makes no sense to expect willpower to be what'll make the fatter country skinnier when that doesn't seem to be why skinnier countries are skinnier.
I seems like people cant help but discuss this issue in a black or white way, when it isnt a binary. Choice obviously matters. It is difficult to change. Environment obviously matters. It is difficult to change.
When talking about human society, environment is a culmination of collective choice.
People who say willpower is futile are still faced with choice of if they feed their kids soda and McDonalds for breakfast.
It's difficult to do but demonstrably possible. That's why it is hard to consider any non-willpower solution. And why it is very easy to be consumed by ego if you've done it. I used to be in the militant-willpower camp because I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, so to speak. I had to study... me, in order to make it work. I had to be smarter than default mode network me and anticipate my behavior.
To change my lifestyle meant somehow incorporating all the good behaviors I wanted to do but within the limitations of being me. It took a lot of work. I carefully measured my caloric intake (gram scale all the things) and expenditure (fitness watch with optical HR, fancy schmancy scale that does body fat estimation) plus doing things like: always taking the stairs, combine my morning run/cycle with my commute (shower at the office), taking the longer way, etc. Dropped 40kg. Went from couch to running half-marathons and cycling centuries. I had to completely change my relationship with food and study all of the nutrition stuff that was never taught to me. I had to unlearn habits instilled by my parents (emotional eating, boredom eating) which meant finding different ways to deal with stress and relieve boredom. ADHD is a bitch. And weed is awesome. Learning how to accommodate munchies without putting on weight also requires forethought.
No. It really isn't all that realistic for everyone to do what I did much less have the same privileges and opportunities. I had to treat my body like a biologist studying a critter. I was incredibly lucky to be at the right spot in my life where I hit a glass ceiling at work and had so much fuck you energy pent up from feeling out of control of my life. I chose to exert maximum control over my body in order to cope and prove something.
It was a monumental amount of effort over a two year period. It is extremely unrealistic to ask people to use a gram scale for their food consistently. Or to log/track their food intake for every bite. Or to always monitor their heart rate to estimate/track your caloric output. Hyper monitoring your body is a weird hobby.
I really do think instead we should be legislating and regulating food more strictly. Labeling isn't really enough. Food science is being weaponized, much like psychology has been with advertising. We shouldn't allow that kind of manipulation for profit.
On a micro level you can change your environment easily - stop buying foods that are bad for you at the store. Don't go down the chip and candy aisle. If you are not the one who shops for food in your household, inform the one who is that for your health they need to not purchase snacks.
In my anecdotal experience, fat people grossly underestimate how much they eat or lack the understand of how calorically dense the foods they consume are.
Taking a picture of everything you consume in a week that isn’t water, and reviewing it at the end of the week is fucking mind blowing if you’re honest about it.
Science is a process, not an agent that can agree or disagree.
On a personal level we can do a lot more than just try harder. We can make permanent lifestyle changes in which healthier options become the default rather than something that we have to actively choose. This can be done in (almost) any environment.
Given the current balance of the court, I'd say it's about even odds we end the entire century without ever having had a liberal court the entire time. Best reasonable case we're a solid couple of decades from it, and even that's not got great odds.
We'd have a better chance if anyone with power were talking about court reform to make the Supreme Court justices e.g. drawn by lot for each session from the district courts, but approximately nobody is. It'd be damn good and long overdue reform, but oh well.
And the thing is, we've already had a fairly conservative court for decades. I'm pretty likely to die, even if of old age, never having seen an actually-liberal court in the US my entire life. Like, WTF. Frankly, no wonder so much of our situation is fucked up, backwards, and authoritarianism-friendly. And (sigh) any serious attempts to fix that are basically on hold for many decades more, assuming rule of law survives that long anyway.
[EDIT] My point, in short, is that "we still have [thing], we just have to wait for a liberal court that'll support it" is functionally indistinguishable from not having [thing].
A liberal court will probably start drawing exceptions to 1A out of thin air like "misinformation" and "hate speech." I'd rather stick with what we have.
It has nothing to do with spirituality or morals. Skinny-country person moves to the US, they get fatter (statistically speaking). They weren't skinny at home because they were better spiritual warriors or whatever, but because they didn't live in the US.
The options are to fix what are probably a whole bunch of problems across multiple domains at a cost of $(enormous sum) with a project spanning many decades (and which may easily be derailed and set back years and years at any time), so that living in the US doesn't make people gain weight, or... drugs, that work today. From a policy perspective, those are the only options. There's no good reason to think that reversing "moral decline" or whatever will help, since that doesn't seem to be why some other countries are skinnier.
Just to enumerate a few of the sides of this problem:
- economics. Junk food is more available because processed foods last longer and can be stored at mini marts and gas stations. It is true that beans and rice are cheaper than junk food, but junk food is a very cheap way for a dopamine hit.
- time: people have less time to cook due to working and commuting
- urban planning: walkable neighborhoods are few in the US. Lots of daily exercise is foregone for this simple reason.
- culture: the US has a very pleasure-seeking culture. Given the choice of having healthy food vs gratifying food, we tend to the latter.
All of these factors conspire to get us where we are.
1) Find a few brands with more options than just "S/M/L". You want fit variants, like Brooks Brothers' "Milano/Regent/Madison" (and some others) or Jcrew's "slim/extra slim". If button-ups, consider going with neck & arm sizing plus the above cut-variants, instead of "S/M/L" sizing at all. Also, look into Japanese brands (Kamakura?), they might fit you better even if they only have one or two variants of cut. These brands will tend to have pretty consistent sizing.
2) You're gonna want measurements of your own actual chest, neck, and natural waist. Easy to DIY close enough for this, no need for help.
3) Also, measurements of some clothes that fit you well. Shoulder, seam-to-seam; arm length; pit-to-pit width.
4) The brands from #1 will have charts that provide measurements for their clothes, or else suggested body measurements at a given size. Use the info from 2 & 3 to get good guesses at which sizes and fit variants will work.
5) Thrift or ebay some options. You can resell the ones that don't work out for close to what you bought them for, if it's worth it to you, or just dump them at goodwill. You're paying a few tens or a little over a hundred dollars in failures to find your sizing in a few brands. This is basically the only totally-lost cost to this process (and again, you can actually recover most of this if it's worth it to you)
6) Now you know your size in a few good consistent-sized brands. Ebay with your exact size in each brand (use saved searches, like "(jcrew,j.crew,j crew) 'extra slim' medium shirt") or sale-shop directly from the brands' sites. No, or very few, returns needed. You can also thrift-shop much more efficiently, at least at places that size-sort. You're just skimming for brand tags you recognize, and totally ignoring everything else.
[EDIT] And actually with the measurements from #3 you can ebay lots of shirts from brands you've never tried, with reasonable success rates—any listing worth bothering with will provide pit-to-pit and (when relevant) sleeve measurements, at least.
It should be possible to protect content hosting services from extensive liability while not protecting companies from the consequences of what they choose to promote and present to people. Those are two separate and very different activities that aren't even necessarily connected (you could curate and promote without hosting, and in fact this happens all the time; you can host without curating and promoting, this also happens all the time—in fact, these typically are not mixed together outside of social media companies with their damned "algorithms", as far as content from 3rd parties goes)