The Obesity Issue

The past 6+ months I’ve read multiple newspapers a day. Why? Because I wanted to stop eating behind my desk or behind a screen. Instead, whenever I eat something, I go away from my workspace. I grab a newspaper and move to the kitchen or even our garden table (if weather permits), and eat while reading the news.

In doing so, I noticed a pattern. Every single week there would be multiple articles talking about obesity, or our declining health in general. I’ve read the mantra “eat less, exercise more” so many times the past six months.

But I read all of them. Because it’s a large issue that’s especially interesting to me because of my chronic illness. It’s a systemic issue, and frequent readers know how much I love to talk about that! My decision to stop eating while working was made to prevent getting overweight myself, so there’s a bit of irony to reading those articles in the papers now.

This article will give my thoughts about the three different news articles I encountered in the papers.

• The raw statistics about it, and possibly how to interpret them.
• Possible methods for solving this, which mostly comes down to lifestyle and exercise advice.
• People saying we should stop fat shaming and make the world more accessible to overweight people.

And then I’ll end the article talking about my own personal problems with eating (too much) and how these news articles influenced me.

The Statistics

I’m still surprised whenever I read the statistics. About half of all people in the Netherlands are overweight. They predict this to be (at least) 2/3 by 2050. America has already been at that point for a while. The Netherlands is doing relatively well in terms of exercise, probably thanks to our cycling culture.

Whenever I see that, I start wondering. Do I really see so many overweight people? Do I really see a single overweight person for every non-overweight person? No, I don’t. When I present these statistics to others, they often agree and can’t believe them.

This felt like a perfect opportunity to show, again, the danger of misinterpreting statistics. Or, the other way around, the danger of relying on personal experience to invent some belief about statistics.

When we do this “test”, we dig into our memories looking for overweight people. We think about the last five times we went on the road and the people we saw then. This is unlikely to yield 50% overweight people. In fact, this morning I went for a run, and I saw only a handful of other people who were all fit and lean.

But the statistic isn’t wrong—our perception is simply biased.

Most people move around in a relatively small space. We are mostly surrounded by the same people, by our friends and family, every day. As such, if your environment simply doesn’t match the average statistic, then you will never see it in effect! You will only see it when you move somewhere else or there’s a drastic change in your daily routine.

Similarly, we have to consider the habits of overweight people. They are obviously less likely to exercise, to go outside, to go for a walk in the park. There’s an element of lack of mobility, yes, but also an element of shame. In your average trip to the supermarket, or even your average television show, you’re simply not going to encounter many overweight people. This skews our perception even more.

And then we have the danger of familiarity and habituation. What is overweight? If you asked people a hundred years ago, their barrier would be far lower than it is today. If you grow up around many overweight people, your perception of what is “too much fat” changes. You start to see someone with an unhealthy appetite as “normal” or “within reasonable boundaries”. I’m sure I encounter many people who are technically overweight, but I don’t register them as such, because I’ve seen loads of people comfortable with their belly by now.

Our definition of “overweight” isn’t perfect, of course. Anyone with a BMI (Body Mass Index) above 25 is classified as overweight, and above 30 is obese. We can all point at outliers, such as a really muscular man that’s technically overweight. But this definition is quite good for 99% of the cases. It’s not “too strict”: you will only be counted as overweight if you really are.

So yes, based on all the other statistics and evidence I can see, this number is correct. About half of the people here are overweight. This is reducing their lifespan, their mobility, their health. It also puts an immense strain on society.

But when you ask someone about this, they are likely to brush it off. We don’t perceive it to be that way. Both fit and obese people will give the same response: “that can’t be true!”

But it is. It’s a typical example of how any statistic relies on loads of different factors. Most people only encounter one factor, such as their environment and how it barely changes, and can never reliably see the statistic. That’s why we need science and hard numbers, calculations without bias.

How to solve this?

In the introduction I called this a systemic issue. Fortunately, this is one of the few areas in society where this is understood! The obesity problem is one of the few problems where people know it’s not as simple as “just eat less duh”. One of the few situations where everyone understands the health of humans is a system and you need to consider everything that goes into it.

For example,

• I read an article talking about how “stress” makes us more likely to impulse buy unhealthy food.
• Or how unhealthy food is often cheaper, so those with less income have no choice.
• Or how humans tied a lot of social or cultural behavior to food (such as dining together, eating three meals a day, etcetera)
• Or how children are forced by the educational system to sit on a chair 8 hours every day. (And as most people know by now, sitting is the new smoking.)

In recent years, scientific research has also made a dent in common ideas about health.

For example, studies show that our bodies largely intend to burn the same number of calories each day. If you exercise more … your body will simply do less the rest of the day. I’ve experienced this myself numerous times. If I exercise long and hard in the morning, I am far less productive the rest of the day. In a way, I’m trading “productivity in my mental work” for “productivity in my physical health”.

If you eat more, your body either stores it as fat, or tries to use all those extra calories. This isn’t necessarily good. It can make you so restless you can’t sleep. It can cause your immune system to overreact to everything, creating more sickness and infections than otherwise.

As such, exercising more does not fully solve the problem, nor does eating less.

I held this misconception for far too long. During my teenage years, I exercised a lot. And, because of that, I felt like I could eat whatever I wanted. And yes, this wasn’t a major issue, because I was still fit and burning a lot of calories. But it was still an issue. I was always eating too much. I was eating unhealthy food instead of supporting my body.

And as I got older, and lost some of the time/energy to exercise that much, those eating habits became a major issue. I was still eating whatever I wanted, but not using most of it. My body still expected all those calories, making it really hard to say no to that.

So no, the first step is always to do BOTH.

You exercise for your health, you consider your diet for your weight.

Exercise

If I do a short run in the morning, I feel more energized and can focus more easily on my work. I am more productive. I feel better and have fewer doubts about my creative projects. My body obviously functions and looks better when it’s fit enough to run 5 kilometers at good speed.

But the amount of extra calories burned is negligible. When I tried running far longer or faster, I didn’t really lose weight, but I was too tired to do much work afterwards. (And because I’d run for longer, I was convinced I could eat more food again, so I think I actually gained weight … while running nearly 10km a day.)

Most of our calories are used for our brains and for maintaining our muscles. Our brains are always active and a huge power hog. Our muscles store most of our energy—to be expended when using the muscle, of course—and take up the rest of your intake. So the best way to lose weight, without considering what you eat yet, is to grow your muscles (resistance training) and to use your brain more intensely (instead of shutting it off or staying within your comfort zone).

There are days when I do research for a Saga of Life story, forgetting to exercise, and I’m absolutely dead tired at the end of the day. Just reading article after article, researching facts about history and biology, making connections, writing down new ideas, trying to solve the major challenge of turning that into an engaging plot (for a story) … it’s such a hard challenge for my brain that it drains way more calories than exercise.

Diet

But okay, you now have a habit of exercising (resistance and stamina). As I explained, you’re probably much fitter and healthier, but not necessarily losing weight.

What now? The obvious answer is “eat less” or “eat fewer calories”. More specifically, it’s recommended to exercise “portion control”. This literally means that you plan your portions and make sure you eat exactly what you need, and nothing else.

This isn’t really useful, though. In the Netherlands, for example, we live in a world where piles of tasty food are within arm’s reach at all times. Our entire body is made to eat and to be rewarded for finding food. As such, all the discipline in the world isn’t enough to say no to all of it. Even people with the funds and time to cook healthy dinners struggle here. Because any time we see food, our brain screams we want to eat it. And in our current society, we see (unhealthy, calorie-filled) food all the darn time.

I have tried, like so many, to control my portions. It’s just not going to happen.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I have an incredible work ethic and discipline. Writing dozens of books a year, creating dozens of games a year, maintaining all these websites—it surely doesn’t happen because of “motivation” or “luck” :p But even I struggle immensely to control my food intake. To say no when someone bought a bag of crisps and wants to share it. To say no when I’m at a birthday and cake is offered.

The research also shows that intermittent fasting is functionally the same as portion control. It amounts to roughly the same calorie intake and response from your body.

I would still recommend the first one over the second one, though. Because it is far easier to tell yourself “I eat between X and Y; I don’t eat any other time of day”, than to exercise precise portion control every single time you eat. It’s easier to make a habit out of eating once a day, or only eating in the morning, than to rely on restraint and discipline whenever you eat, all the time.

I basically switched to intermittent fasting on accident. All my life, I’d eaten all day long, and it just wasn’t great. I was distracted by the thought “food? let’s eat food? now?” all day. My dentist was complaining. I was noticeably getting fatter.

So I just stopped doing that. I told myself I’d only eat in the afternoon, and never outside of that. I only later learned that this was a thing called “intermittent fasting”.

I thought it was impossible—it actually turned out quite easy to do. All my life, I had been told that you needed to eat regularly. I was basically forced to take my “three meals a day”, forced to eat my lunch at school. But it just wasn’t true. We function absolutely fine on eating once in a while, as long as we simply eat enough (of the right things). This accidental switch helped me so much during the covid pandemic.

But this isn’t the end of the story. There are some more misconceptions, or things working against us.

Saturation Suppression: Lots of food has added components that suppress your saturation signal. This food is literally designed to keep you eating more and buying more, because you keep being hungry.

Sugar, for example, does this. That’s why people can keep eating and eating sugary things, because it suppresses the signal that tells our body that we’re full.

As such, a good way to stop eating too much is to stop buying such food. It is good to feel full after eating something. Buy the things that achieve that, which usually means staying away from sugar or superficially added components.

Which leads me to …

Fat isn’t bad: Some time ago, lots of food started producing “0% fat” packages and such, promoting them as if they were the best thing for your health ever. Many people, including me and my parents, believed this was good. Surely, if we want to be less fat, we should eat less fat!

It’s not that simple. People generally speak of good fat (saturated) and bad fat (unsaturated). Just how we have good grains (whole) and bad grains (basically any other version).

Our body wants food. It needs it. You should absolutely eat some fat food, as long as it’s the right kind. Because it will actually make you feel saturated quickly. You will eat one bowl of yoghurt (with, say, 5% fat) instead of three bowls of yoghurt (with 0% fat version).

Many people have pointed out this “contradiction” and I have noticed it myself. Lots of food that markets itself as being healthy (and 0% fat is the worst offender here) isn’t bad on its own, but it makes you eat more of it because it’s less fulfilling. Which, as a whole, makes it bad.

Which finally leads me to …

Fat vs Energy: Your body basically has to decide all the time if it wants to use calories for energy immediately, or store them as fat. Some people seem to be able to eat “whatever they want” and never get fat, and we usually say those people have a “quick metabolism”. They simply turn almost everything they eat into energy to use, instead of fat to store. How your body balances this is mostly decided by your genes.

This is why most diets don’t work or are actually bad for you. When you suddenly start eating way fewer calories, your body goes into panic mode. You disrupted the balance. It fears that food has become more scarce, and thus, as a fail-safe, starts storing more of it as fat (and releasing less of it as energy).

Compare it to finances. Normally, you might save only 5% of your income in some reserve, and spend the rest of it immediately on things you want. This is a healthy balance between living now and preparing for the future. Then you suddenly get fired (or switch jobs, or the economy collapses) and your income drastically lowers. You’re likely to change that balance, aren’t you? Depending on the type of person you are, you either save more ( = store more fat) or spend it all ( = have no reserves left at all). Both of which aren’t great for the future.

If you want to start eating less, you want to do it in small steps, combined with gradual increase in exercise.

Other factors

Yes, exercise and diet are still the most important aspects. But they are all heavily influenced by the rest of your system.

It is hard to actually achieve the things I mentioned above when you’re feeling bad. When you’re not sleeping well, or hungover, or stressed about something, or unhappy in general.

Believe me, I know. I’ve been permanently unhappy for basically 10 years now. It is really hard to forbid yourself from eating all that tasty food when you’re feeling bad about everything and lack the energy to do your work.

As such, I think this deserves equal attention. It’s almost useless to try and control your portions when you’re permanently stressed. You will just override your discipline every single time to eat whatever you want.

This is, of course, an area that’s far too large to enumerate here. I’ll just mention some common causes.

• Alcohol is remarkably similar to sugar in its effects. So yes, drinking more will lead you to eat more than you need.
• If you don’t sleep well, you are more likely to make bad decisions in general, which includes eating unhealthy food or too much of it.
• Do all your shopping offline. It takes more effort, it takes walking around, which means you’re unlikely to buy too much food (or stuff in general).
• Similarly, before you go grocery shopping, make a precise list of all you need. Buy that, nothing else.
• Food is a shortcut to dopamine. To prevent reaching for food, make sure you derive some pleasure or satisfaction from other things during the day.
• Food is also a shortcut for energy. To prevent reaching for it, make sure other parts of your life don’t drain energy—and, preferably, give energy.

Should we respect fat people?

Things brings me to the final part of this article. The thing that surprised me the most in all those news articles. So many times, they interviewed obese people and allowed them to make their case. They gave examples of how society disrespects fat people, how it’s not accessible to them, how it shames them. They created all sorts of organizations to force laws or policies to change, or at least to make people change their mind.

From what I’ve seen in the newspapers, the number of fat people claiming they should be respected for being fat is far higher than the number of people actually giving advice and trying to make people healthy again.

Because their most common argument is: “Over half the population is overweight. Isn’t it silly, then, to design things for people with less weight?”

This, of course, is not an argument. Unfortunately, I see this all the time. The argument of “look at the current situation—we must adapt!”

The fact that there’s a problem means you must solve it. It doesn’t mean you must assume the problem is just “how it’s supposed to be” and ask people to go around it, accepting it as the new normal. In fact, we arrived at this situation because of many bad decisions, so these problems always have easy solutions too: undo the bad decisions.

It is never an argument to point at how something is, currently, and say “it is how it is, you must accept it”. If it were, my country would currently still be under Nazi rule.

Let me state, first, that I never cared for “respect” or anything. It’s a meaningless subjective term, merely abused to force people to shut up instead of hearing criticism. If you ask ten people what “respecting fat people” means, they’ll all give different opposing answers.

But if you do want to talk in such terms, then I propose we keep “disrespecting” fat people. Because it provides an incentive to stop the problem. As long as seats are only designed for reasonable weight, people will have a constant reminder to perhaps work on their health. As long as doors are wide enough for anyone of reasonable size, it will incentivize overweight people to be conscious of it.

The very best way to solve a systemic problem, is to design an environment—the rules of the game, if you will—to incentivize solving the problem. The best way to stop humans from becoming overweight, is to allow all the disadvantages that come with it to exist. To make them worse, if needed. If you want people to be healthy, then they should be rewarded for being healthy.

Instead, catering to overweight people would reward unhealthy people for being unhealthy. The exact opposite of what you want in any system. Even worse, it would potentially punish healthy people for being healthy.

The airplane seats example

For example, take airplane seats. Currently, overweight people have to pay for two seats. Because, well, they literally don’t fit in a single one. Several organizations are trying to get them to create bigger (single) seats in airplanes instead. What would be the effect of that?

• Planes can carry fewer passengers, meaning it’s far less lucrative, meaning the price of tickets shoots through the roof.
• Overweight people are rewarded for being overweight by paying less than they otherwise would have.
• While everyone else is punished for being healthy by paying more than they otherwise would have.

Not a great idea.

But even this single example can get much worse. Research indicates that the extra average weight of humans has massively increased fuel consumption (in airplanes). It is thus already a factor in raised ticket prices, as well as worsening climate change. If you want to be really pedantic about it, overweight people have already been ruining it for everyone for a while.

Systems, systems, systems

As a game developer, I obviously think in systems all the time. It’s how I approach most of these problems. This might seem silly to others, but it’s proven valid every single time I tried.

The only way to get a fair and functioning system, is if it’s balanced and rewards people doing the right things. If it’s not balanced, the system will inevitably spiral out of control until it blows up. It people are not rewarded for doing the right things, they will not do them.

It has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the obesity epidemic is not a behavior society wants or can uphold. It puts a strain on everything and everyone. My airplane example is just a tiny blip in a universe of examples. Any shift to accomodate it, to accept it as the new normal, would punish people for being healthy and reward people for not being that. It would be an unbalanced system that will blow up at some point.

In this case, people would become unhealthier even faster, because they’re now rewarded for it. Until we get into this strange WALL-E situation where no human is fit enough to do any work and our medical system can’t handle it all.

It’s like … do these obesity support organizations not understand? When they complain about not fitting into a rollercoaster ride, because the seat was too narrow, do they understand the entire darn coaster was built by people who are strong and fit? That making the cars wider would have made the coaster take up twice as much space and cost twice as much money, meaning they’d probably also pay twice as much for their park ticket?

This is why everyone should practice system thinking. Why everyone should be a game developer! You can’t just say “make seats wider, it’s not hard”. Such a thing has consequences. You shouldn’t take actions based on what some people want, or how “easy” it is, but whether there are strong arguments for doing so. Whether it improves a system—or would actually destroy its balance. Especially because most people cannot see the system, cannot see the multiple factors, but only the single thing that they care about.

Though most people don’t want to hear it, the shame you feel for being overweight is a good thing. It’s a sign that you realize you’re doing something wrong and might need to change. It’s the natural trigger to become healthier.

A society that punishes extremely unhealthy people is a good thing. Not by taking away human rights, or by actively harming them, of course not! Simply by not putting extra time and effort into accomodating them. Simply by not actively rewarding them, while you can think about actively rewarding people who stay healthy.

But didn’t you say you understand?

Yes, this is why I mentioned my own struggles to stay healthy. It is hard. I can understand overweight people who say “I tried everything, but I think it’s just my genes”. I know exactly how and why we got into this situation.

Many days, I feel like I’m one bad month away from being overweight myself. I exercise and work a lot, burning many calories, which requires me to eat quite a lot too. I’m afraid that one day I take a vacation, or I just can’t make myself exercise anymore, and boom—I’m overweight too. I run every day of the week, except Sundays, and almost every day I wake up and think “uuugh can’t I just skip it today”.

It’s a struggle, it always will be, until the day you die. Society and capitalism make this even harder. You can all laugh at me if you read this article and, in ten years, you see me on television being several overweight or something.

But I try. And I am fine with things becoming inaccessible to me once I become unhealthy. In the same way that I am fine with being punished if I break a reasonable law. I understand that the system needs to reward and punish certain behaviors to work. Despite how much my self-interest, my brain that goes “food! food! food!”, makes up excuses to disagree with it.

As stated, I basically ate whatever (including lots of sugar, snacks, etcetera) for 10 years as I grew up. This wasn’t great. I will probably have to deal with that bad habit my entire life, because your eating habits are mostly formed as you grow up. Over the years, I saw myself grow slightly more overweight, and I kept telling myself “it’s not that bad, I still exercise a lot” Until you’re at a point where you just have to accept it is getting bad and you have to change.

But simple habits, such as exercising each day, intermittent fasting, realizing it’s good to feel full and to seek out such foods, helped a lot. I have a stand-up desk now, which means I rarely sit, and I’m far more likely to move around in general. I purposely placed my workspace far away from other things, to force me to take two flights of stairs numerous times a day.

I have all sorts of tiny, simple habits that challenge my body (and my eating habits) every single day. A silly one, for example, is that I sometimes eat until I have completely consumed the newspaper. Well … then I have nothing left to read or do, so I stop eating, or I’ll get bored! (And yes, I have a simple rule of leaving my phone at my work desk too, so it’s never with me while I eat.)

Some people seem to believe that life should be fun all the time. That some people are just “motivated” to stay healthy, like a talent, and some are not. This is obviously not true. Instead, people actually derive fun from effort. The bigger the challenge, the more satisfied we feel once we complete it. Once you experience this a few times—for example, by exercising and really challenging your body—the floodgates open.

I believe people need that to realize the effort is worth it. To realize it has nothing to do with motivation or character, but everything with just putting in the hard work. But so many people these days stop as soon as things get slightly hard, so they never get to the fun part, they never get to experience the satisfaction afterwards.

Most of all, I think the most important step is to accept that you will always have to worry about your health. It never ends. There are no days, months, or years off. Visiting the gym once in a blue moon does not mean you are “done” for that month and can sit on a chair and eat what you want. Life is an endless struggle to “do your best”. Once you can accept that, I believe, it will be easier to put in that extra work each day and challenge yourself.

When people are asked about being overweight, they often claim it is “never a choice”.

When people who are not overweight are asked, they often claim it is “always a choice”.

This article basically showed both sides and how, as usual, the truth is somewhere down the middle. Parts of it are a choice, parts are not. You can absolutely exercise more, but it’s not a full solution. You can absolutely just eat less, but it’s not “easy” in any way. You absolutely have the right to be fat if you want, and nobody should attack or belittle you for it, but you should also accept that this is unhealthy and society should not bend to your weighty will.

Hopefully, this (long) article achieved a few things.

• It explains the (current) statistics on obesity and why you should believe them, even if your personal perception tells you not to.
• It explains some of the best ways I know to actually improve your health and weight.
• It explains how we should not start accepting obesity as normal and accomodating it, all in the name of that mythical “respect”.

I’m not even sure why I write things like these. Just to get my thoughts out, I guess, and maybe help a few people or prevent systemic disasters. Perhaps a reminder to myself to stay wary of my own eating habits.

So, as usual, these were my thoughts,

Tiamo