Eating is habit forming. That is a truism. But eating between meals is also a habit and based on a scientific trial of one person (me) you can break that habit. You can also break the 3 meals a day habit. I eat two now. I don’t eat between around 2 PM and 8 AM the next morning. Many people just skip breakfast. I like to eat breakfast, but that’s just me.
Of course, you can eat enough at two meals to gain weight. But it is much harder.
I have a friend with type 2 diabetes who tried that, and all his blood sugar numbers got a lot better. People’s metabolisms differ, and anecdotally I’ve also heard from people whose numbers got better when they replaced 3 large meals with a lot of little snacks. But it’s something worth discussing with your doctor if you have type 2 diabetes, I think.
I have also had a lot of cats who had full time access to food.
Some of them did get fat (though none got fat enough to slow them down; possibly because they got exercise and I didn’t restrict their food.) You know what the fat ones had in common? They’d all gone hungry at some point in their lives before I got them.
Want to reduce obesity? Stop encouraging people to go on weight-loss diets. Encourage them to eat well, including to minimize eating ultra-processed foods: fine, and a good idea. Encourage everybody, including people who aren’t obese to start with, to starve themselves some of the time: you’ll get a whole lot of fat people.
That’s good since the more of your calories you eat earlier in the day the healhier your diet will be. Better to skip evening meals instead and not eat much of anything after 6 pm.
This thread is an example of how woefully inadequate people’s info about diet is. The number one thing would be to start and maintain a thorough public health campaign on actually healthy food and dietary patterns.
Obesity is that. And, as with diabetes, the drug isn’t going to be a cure except in borderline cases.
Answering the thread question - none for now. When liraglutide (currently expensive and not often covered by insurance) goes generic in a few years, the message that it is available will reduce rates. Plummet? No.
What message would it takes to make rates of dangerous thinness plummet?
“Food is scarce”.
Well, that would make voluntary dangerous thinness plummet. There might be an increase in involuntary dangerous thinness.
No one who has ever gone to college believes you cannot eat healthy filling meals cheaply.
A can of cheap pasta sauce and a box of spaghetti is like $6, that’s 8 filling meals.
Bag of black beans is $1.50, tortillas cheap, bulk shredded cheese is cheap, onions almost free, burritos for a week.
Bananas and potatoes are almost free. I could go on.
Exercise of any stripe is also free.
People are lazy. ‘I don’t have the time to…’ = lazy.
No message will make people less lazy, hell, our economic drive depends on consumers spending less effort. Since Covid my local Chipotle requires their app to order for pickup…not downloading that so no more Chipotle for me till this blows over.
Is it bizarre to no one we have an increasing poverty AND obesity problem?
It’s bizarre on the face, but it’s all down to environmental factors. Exercise has changed from being something done in the course of (paid or unpaid) work, so mostly by poor people, to something that takes time and/or money - much more available to the rich. And unhealthy junk food is now often cheaper, and definitely less effort, than healthy food. Obesity these days is more often due to eating bad food than too much of otherwise healthy foods.