M. Dilger on Nostr: These are complicated topics. Now I want to comment on a lot of them. I'm nowhere ...

These are complicated topics. Now I want to comment on a lot of them.

I'm nowhere near as fat as Israel was, and I don't know what it is like to be like that. But I know what it is like to be 100kg. I lost major weight twice. First because I was desperate to attract a mate that was as hot as I wanted her to be. I got down to 78kg (from 100kg). I kept it off for 3 years but lost focus. Without a constant life focus on keeping it off, it comes back fast. The second time I had sudden pulsitile tinnitus of unknown etiology. It scared me enough to lose 15kg. But that came back after a year or so. Now I'm suffering pretty bad sleep apnea, but I'm on a CPAP machine, so I don't have the "I'm so scared I'm gonna die I need to lose weight fast" impetus this time. But even if I did, it's easy to predict that the loss would again be temporary.

You will get a somewhat different outcome if you keep trying even though you know you will fail, than if you give up because you know you will fail. I keep trying anyways in order to get the marginal or temporary better outcome. But when smug and proud never-been-fat people tell me how it is (and are clearly far from correct) it kinda pisses me off.

Henry Kissinger was still pretty chubby when he died recently at 100 from congestive heart failure. George R.R. Martin is 75, and he's fatter than I am. Very fat people like Israel, however, have no chance to live that long.

Population obesity rates have been increasing. That is not explained by evolutionary ancestry... something else is going on. And I do not know the answer to that riddle (maybe it is solved but I don't know the answer). But my father was at least as heavy as I am, and his mother was huge, and my mother was overweight too. So I have an ancestry explanation.

As for life expectancy, I think either the virus or the vaccine has caused this. People are dying for reasons that aren't easy to coorelate to the original cause. If someone young dies of pericarditis, well that was the vaccine. But most of the deaths could go either way -- might be a long-term side effect of having had COVID, or it might be a long-term side effect of having had the vaccine. In NZ, our life expectancy has not dropped like yours has. We locked down the country and only got COVID later on (I think delta) and smashed it, then we got it again when Omicron came through. Omicron was so mild it probably didn't cause the same long-term effects. But we still do have elevated excess deaths... they just haven't affect life expectancy... and there is some evidence that the vaccine is responsible.