Why Obese People Can't Stop Eating

hey guys so I wanted to be transparent I am so just emotionally um broken today I want to eat all my feelings I want to binge I feel possessed for the whole day like I don't care like I'm not myself kind of like I'm on the outside watching myself so I'm going to be doing a lot of emotional eating and I already know what's going to happen because I have some food in front of me the person you just saw is 33-year-old you YouTuber amberlin Reed probably the only person who has made more videos about

her weight loss progress than boogie 2988 now it's one thing to talk about your progress or be public about your self-improvement to help Inspire other people certainly I was on Boogie side for years when he shared his progress but when you've been making the same I'm going to lose weight video for 10 years and you're like 200 lb heavier than when you started I sto thinking that you're actually trying to recover from your addiction and began to think that the weight loss videos are just a Griff to get sympathy from people and eating junk food

and half of your thumbnails doesn't help either that being said I know that amberlin has a long history of drama over the past decade and she is a well-beloved lcal with many fun moments to cover but a lot of other creators have already talked about her history so I don't think that's the most useful thing that can be discussed on my channel instead what I would like to primarily focus on is this one video here which very accurately describes what a lot of addicts go through when they are not in recovery amberlin is fully aware

of her addiction she knows what she's doing is wrong and yet she chooses to binge eat anyway I'm going to show you guys the first thing I'm going to eat so I ordered Mexican food here are the chips Mexican rice and we have some tamali honestly this looks freaking delicious so I am super pumped and I'm going to watch a TV show while I eat this and numb all my feelings so here I go okay so this is how much I have left of this and the rice I did eat some chips I don't have

the exact calorie count on this stuff but seeing that she ate almost all of those four tamales some chips and a lot of that rice she probably ate around 1,500 calories in that one meal and she's not done so it has been no more than a minute since I stopped eating my food and I have candy I have Twix I will show you guys exactly how many I choose to eat I ended up having all of the Twix so here we have six funs siiz Twix candies that are 80 calories each you can see that

on the bag which means she ate roughly 500 calories of candy after that 1500 calorie meal and now we're at a full day worth of calories for the average woman just during breakfast with that said let me bring your attention to a survey from this Jubilee video here being fat or skinny is a choice being fat or skinny is a choice 63% said it's not wow 145 people voted on this and there is a lot of cope happening amongst the people who subscribe to Jubilee's patreon so even though it looks like amberlin Reed is grifting

in her video for sympathy views wait speaking of things that coincidentally have the word read in them check out Reed Street soap to get some of the best smelling soaps my new addiction is the oaka soap you can also check out the wood shop or day at the beach soaps those are good as well and don't forget to check out the candles they have cool designs and smell great so they make excellent gifts if you want to shop at Reed Street soap click on the first link in the description so even though it looks like

amberlin Reed is kind of grifting to Garner sympathy and emotional support for her addiction one thing she doesn't do is lie about how much she eats or at least not entirely and she doesn't lie about the fact that she is fully aware that she's making a choice to eat like crap I cannot stress this enough obesity is a choice it's not genetic yeah maybe there are some environmental factors that make things more difficult or a small percentage of women have thyroid issues but ultimately these people are choosing to overeat and the ones who say I

don't know how I gained all this weight are lying to you and trying to cover up their addiction news flash addicts lie and try to hide their addiction all the time anyone who actually deals with these people knows they eat a ton of food here's doctor now talking about how much this 900lb 26-year-old eats he following any diet the last calories that I was trying to get him at was approximately 2500 a day we were 2500 a day yeah you know what we do keep him 800 that's fine we know what we're getting into yeah

and the reality is Sean must be taken in at least 20 to 30,000 calorie a day and that is because his mother bringing it to him you're killing him right now this has to stop that sounds about right I love the non-nonsense take of someone who knows the psychology and is used to being lied to all the time he can see what the scale says so he knows you aren't telling the truth plus when someone's that big a lot of it's from bloating from the food in their intestines or water retention and not from fat

someone who only eats 2500 calories a day which is maintenance calories for a man would not be that bloated anyway let's get back to amberlin and go to her second meal of the day next thing I'm having is a whole box of the paston it is in the angel hair pasta with herbs it is a Whole Bowl literally right now this is more so like an emotional eating moment because I'm frustrated because of the video I just had to film frustrated me and let's see is food going to make me feel better it is realistically

it is I already feel bad better that's emotional eating for you and the food addict okay let's see if this food makes me feel better that is the textbook definition of an addict that meal was around 750 calories by the way which puts her at 2700 but if you're using drugs or destructive behaviors to regulate your emotions or to make you feel better that is addiction this video is from 3 years ago which means we are 7 years into amberlin weight loss journey and she still has not learned how to regulate eating this is someone

who is not trying to get better she's instead engaging in bad behaviors feeling guilty relapsing when the guilt goes away and not making any changes to stop herself from repeating the cycle this is the stage where I feel guilt I honestly was feeling sick because I ate so much I was having guilt and um now I'm ashamed and mad at myself and I wish I could take it all back but as it's happening you you just can't control it yes you can control it but it's not from the standpoint of bro just have willpower this

is someone who is severely addicted to food to the point where her life is in danger and willpower will not work when you're on a day where your mindset is screw it I give up I'm going to get high like she is you can't just will that away it takes strategy to overcome that feeling if you're an addict you need to make it more difficult to access the things that you're addicted to amberin is not doing that which is why she's failing look at the top of her fridge there's like five different boxes of processed

cereals that we can see a full bag of Doritos and it looks like there's a second bag of chips below it this is just what's on her fridge and she already has a whole load of easy to access foods that she can binge on whenever she feels bad and that is probably just a fraction of what she actually has considering that the top of the fridge is a low priority space to store food all of that needs to be thrown away which will make it so the the only way for her to get junk food

is to leave the house so instead of being able to just reach over and grab something she now has to think about it so if you sort of have an Impulse to engage in an addictive behavior if you can create time between the impulse and the access that will help a lot and the more time that we delay the more that our impulse can disappear right a big part of not repeating the cycle is delaying for time the first way an addict in recovery does this is by making the addictive sub more difficult to access

the second way is something that 12ep does with their sponsor system addicts in a 12-step program will get someone more experience to sponsor them and help them with their recovery if you feel an Impulse to use you're supposed to call your sponsor and that person is supposed to distract you from the craving and help manage the impulse there's more to it than that but you'll find that if you delay your impulse instead of just engaging in it right away your brain will change its mind and you'll be able to control that impulse more easily addiction

recover Y is all about relationships and you'll notice that addicts stay addicted because they only Foster relationships with other addicts or people who enable them instead of surrounding themselves with people who will do what's necessary to help if you don't Foster good relationships what will end up happening is that you'll just cycle around and make promises that you can't keep like this okay so this is the stage after the binge it's been a couple hours where you're like okay so I want to change my life I don't ever want to overeat again and and so

in my head I do these drastic measures where I'm like okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to stop eating everything processed I'm just going to eat simple things like chicken breast baked in the oven I'm going to have broccoli and veggies on the side and I'm going to have like brown rice and just eat super clean that is the stage that I'm at now so hello yeah and that all sounds gross no wonder you can't lose weight are you going to at least season that baked chicken how would anyone be able

to maintain a diet with food like that long enough to lose the 350 lbs that you have left to be healthy she definitely doesn't know how to cook very well and when I say cook well I mean that she doesn't know how to mix flavors properly and create high quality food that doesn't come out of a box which is a part of the reason why she isn't grossed out by eating a mountain of candy every day learning how to cook is essential for weight loss and amberin eats like crap because she has the pallette of

a seven-year-old child but currently right now in my brain I'm just like okay okay I really need to shape up I need to just eat clean and healthy and stop being processed and that's where I'm at right now so figured I'd give that update and obviously I'm not going to like follow through on that because this happens all the time and then I bet you in an hour I'll be like actually no never mind I'll continue Weight Watchers and then an hour after that I'll be like actually let's go back to intuitive eating I like

how she says intuitive eating at the end when she's talking about going off her diet I understand that intuitive eating can be useful for people recovering from anorexia but that's because their problem is exercising extreme amounts of control and they need to loosen their boundaries I have yet to see the ideology of eat whatever your body needs whenever you feel like it work consistently for obese people I don't think removing structure with ideas like intuitive eating is a good way to control an addiction like food addiction where the problem is lack of control outside of

that despite her failure at the very least amberlin is describing a process that addicts go through all the time time and she does a very good job of it when you're recovering from food addiction or other addictive behaviors you're probably going to screw up relapse is a part of recovery however what you don't want to do is take that one bad day and turn it into a month of bad eating habits ideally you don't take that bad day too personally and you get right back into the program the next day I think a therapist from

Janette mcc's book had a great way of phrasing it you don't want to let a slip turn into a slide a lot of times repeating mantras like that will help keep you on track none of this is about willpower it's all about strategy which is why I don't like it when movements like the fat acceptance movement constantly make up excuses for why they can't lose weight instead of helping people into a program where they can learn the techniques necessary to fix their health I mean there were so many excuses given by the body positivity crowd

from that Jubilee video with the depressing survey that I showed earlier sorry can someone explain like maybe just for my ignorance I'm guessing a food desert is just there's no food anywhere no it's healthy options for food so you can go into certain low income areas and you'll see a Starbucks a McDonald's a Chick-fil-A a food desert actually properly there isn't any like for a long period of driving there's one gas station and a liquor store then you have to drive two more miles to hit the next grocery store two miles is a food desert

that's what they've been defining as a food desert this whole time such privilege the closest store to me is 4 mil away the majority of the time there's traffic yet I'm not obese if I want to go to a health food store the closest one is 8 mil away and yes there are like a million fast food restaurants along the way I don't eat at them because I'm used to eating real food and fast food is disgusting wow the dumb excuses these people come up with for not fixing their problems I wish I only had

to drive 2 miles to go to the store speaking of disgusting food let's see the last couple of things that amberlin ate I'm also so going to have another Diet Coke so I am about to have some of the Snickers I'll let you know how many I have I all six so that's that so the next thing I'm having it's been I'll say about 4 hours since I last ate and I'm having just pasta with some melted butter and garlic salt and then I'm also going to going to have this Nestle Vanilla Fudge drumstick another

500 calories of candy probably a 200 calorie ice cream and maybe 500 more calories of pasta so now we're around 4,000 calories for the day which is double the amount of calories that she needs for maintenance honestly I don't know how she does this on such a regular basis that she's gotten to that weight because I would feel so sick after a day or two of eating that much junk food that I would just stopped I honestly was feeling sick because I ate so much so it's been about I want to say about 3 hours

since I last spoke to you guys I'm still feeling super sick from what I ate earlier I'm having some major heartburn I feel like it's from the chocolate and in this moment I don't care I'm telling myself I'm still going to have more chocolate later I don't know how what we saw in those clips is not the number one deterrent from eating like crap all the time I think when people eat junk food a lot they don't realize how much better they would feel if they just ate healthy and a big part of the reason

why healthy people don't eat like crap is because they don't want to feel sick and have acid reflux all the time again the problem though is that because of things like fat acceptance or body positivity these people are too busy gaslighting themselves to focus on recovery I guess it depends on what you mean when you think of the term skinny are you thinking of just like an average weight person or are you thinking of how you are now I'm the average weight for like women in America so if we're talking about an average like I'm

going to be the closest all the overweight women agreed what a shock meline the average woman in America is 170 lb you're quite a bit bigger than average there's no way that you weigh under 200 lb and I would guess that you're actually closer to 250 this is kind of the issue with fat acceptance trying to normalize obesity people such as this girl here think they're an average healthy weight when in reality they are morbidly obese and about to get a mountain of health problems when they turn 30 and yes there's actually research on this

here's a study talking about this very issue which is a strong reason why obesity should not be normalized I think people view models and Instagram people and all of us who are plus- eyes and proud as we're pushing this obese lifestyle you definitely should not be proud of being obese and if you actually were proud you wouldn't use a euphemism like plus-sized let me be clear though I'm not saying that fat acceptance encourages people to gain weight but research is showing that it does prevent overweight and obese people from making changes because nobody makes changes

if they don't think anything is wrong another important issue here is that everyone thinks they're an expert researcher yet very few people actually know how to do even the slightest bit of factchecking which makes it so these people are easily fooled into believing some of the dumbest stuff there's a thing called set points there's a ton of research on it that your body likes to be at specific we it likes to be in a specific way so if you are fighting yourself to to lose weight by not eating OV exercising and you are damn near

killing yourself to be at a specific weight your body's unhappy she starts by saying there's a thing called set points there's a ton of research on it so the first thing a person should ask is what research she's trying to make it look like she's had a thorough look at the data so because she's investigated this herself and there's a ton of research on it she should be able to give me the name of a single study off the top of her head or at least point me in the direction of a study if except

she didn't that's a red flag if someone says there's a study or there's a ton of studies and they don't tell you where to find it then they probably didn't read the study what likely happened is that they got the idea from someone who was on their ideological team like this lady here who quite possibly gave the dumbest argument for set points my last patient that I saw today was a young woman who's 39 who struggles with severe obesity she's been working out five to six times a week consistently she's eating very little her brain

is defending a certain set point I'm guessing that it's implied that she's not losing weight I hate to break it to you but if that's the case then she's lying to you about her habits nobody who exercises five to six times a week and eats almost nothing fails to lose weight that is defying the laws of thermodynamics and you're literally saying that no diet plan will work in that case this may come as a shock to you but addicts lie going back to that my 600 lb Life episode with Shawn who was 900 lb pounds

he was supposed to lose weight over a 3-month period but when he comes back in to see Dr now he gained weight Sean is so big right now he cannot make it to the waiting room door he's worse half now and he looked like he maybe put another 50 200 lb on how is the nutrition good good I mean he's eating you know just good healthy food but we need to get on 800 calories Rene his condition is far worse than two months ago you and your mom has not make a single positive change as

far as I can tell see how the mom reports it yeah we have them on a good diet but we didn't hit the goal of 800 calories she's straight up lying they were nowhere near close to that and her son can't walk which means she's the one overfeeding him later in the episode when he actually followed the diet he lost weight unfortunately he ended up dying 3 years later at 29 so yeah addicts lie a lot of times to their own demise but going back to the set points lady here's the part where she accidentally

undermines the theory so we had covid mhm lots and lots of people gain weight do those people have a new set point that's higher now absolutely so when you have a chronic stressor and you get to a certain weight and maintain that weight for let's say at least 3 to six months then you recalibrate that set point to a different set point wait does that only work in One Direction if you can raise your set point in 3 to 6 months then you can also lower your set point in that time period with good diet

and exercise which makes the whole Theory bs anyway I keep hearing this set points crap so I decided to do what everyone else does and do some thorough research on Google by only looking at the top three results that led me to this Pub met article here it goes over what set points are if you care you can read it but for the purposes of this video I don't care so we're just going to go over the reasoning for the theory it starts out by saying notably the rate at which one regains weight following weight

loss is considerably high with over 80% of individuals eventually regaining the weight they lost yeah that's because they're addicts that's not a set point they're gaining the weight back because you didn't treat the addiction you can get an addict to be clean for a few months but especially if you're saying that it's okay for them to binge again when they hit a certain weight they're just going to go right back to the bad behavior the set point Theory May explain the high incidence of regained weight Garvey WT stated obesity protects obesity then it links to

Resource six which says they can't pin down a specific biological mechanism that explains set points and the theory is just a guess imagine that oh wait they do have some evidence that this is Genetic Resource 13 and resource 14 let's look at these studies well resource 13 looks really familiar because I already covered it in the Noah Samson video if you care you can watch the full explanation in that video but basically they found large differences in weight gain despite feeding everyone a diet similar in calories the study was as well done as it could

have been but I still had a lot of different questions that could have explained the differences in weight game between the people studied that were not genetic factors because there are so many factors that could cause different amounts of weight gain studies like this really have to be practiced and be done multiple times if they're going to count as good evidence for genes being a limiting factor in weight loss the second study resource 14 is something we haven't seen before and this is sort of a copycat study of the first one done 10 years later

it even references the first study and I have to to say that this second study Is Not Great science if we're using it to prove the set point Theory however if you don't know anything about nutrition or exercise science you can easily think that this is a good study which is why I said in other videos that you are not qualified to read research if you don't have expertise in the field that you're reading so let's talk about the girl from the Jubilee video who has allegedly seen tons of studies on Seto Theory does she

know what a phenotype is does she know basic mathematic Concepts like what a plus or minus sign is does she know what Jewels are or how to convert them into calories or how to derive that information from the macronutrient count like I did if she doesn't know any of that stuff then she's not qualified to interpret this study that being said there are so many points that this study failed on if we're trying to use it to prove set point Theory just to give context the study went over 14 pairs of obese female twins in

their late 30s they hospitalized them for one month so they could monitor them and feed them a restricted diet of 400 calories a day the end result of the study was that different people lost different amounts of weight some people lost 15 lbs others lost 20 this might make you think that genetics plays a role however there are some problems here now talking about everything will add an extra 10 minutes to the video so I'm only going to go over one of the problems but it's strong enough to be a major reason for why this

study cannot be used to prove a genetic connection for why obese people can't lose weight so here's the problem the researchers checked people's Bas on metabolic rate however they fed everybody the same diet the problem with feeding everyone the same diet is that if one of the women is 6' tall and another is 5'2 they're going to expend different amounts of energy daily because a taller person burns more calories at rest you would need to adjust how many calories each person eats based on what was found during the basom metabolic rate testing to be able

to make a genetic connection to weight loss here I can't believe the researchers for the pub met article use this as an argument for set point Theory when this study has such an obvious issue and then they said overall genetics plays a significant role in determining the set point these guys did a very bad job then they cite resource 11 and 12 which are just Association studies I'm not an expert in genetics but how do we go from we found these genes in obese people to this Gene we found caused the Obesity all of these

air quote genetic links to obesity seem like very weak correlations and awful science but again that's not my field of expertise so take that last part with a grain of salt getting back to that set points doctor from earlier I would like to point out that everyone lost a ton of weight during the study on female obese twins like 15 to 20 pounds in a month it turns out when you actually monitor obese people and they can't cheat magically calories in versus calories out Works what a shock as for our main subject amberlin Reed since

she didn't treat the addiction she's only gotten worse now she's justify her bad eating habits by calling it a cheat day okay so this is what I eat when I just don't fully Care at the moment if you're on a weight loss journey and like you're off track today or you've been off track in the last week or you have a plan to be off track do not let this video and do not let the things I'm saying derail you from wanting a cheat day if you will or a day where you're not counting calories

or points or carbs our bodies are not meant to be robots I'm not saying these things to validate my my current cheat day because I do not deserve one I do not need one and I actively know that but it's like I don't care today but you are justifying your cheat day also if you're trying to lose weight there is no cheat day you can have a cheat meal every so often if you're doing well maybe do a break period where you eat maintenance calories instead of a deficit but if you have a whole cheat

day you can easily derail your entire week of weight loss for example amberlin stated that she ate 5,121 calories that day a proper calorie deficit is at most 500 calories a day which means if she wants to lose weight she should be eating, 1500 calories based on that value she ate an additional 3500 calories in one day which ruins an entire week of a 500 calorie deficit you can cheat a little bit if you want to lose weight but planning out an entire day is ridiculous and amberlin says that she does this regularly I have

these days a lot off a camera so you basically don't care and that's why you're 200 100 lb bigger than you were 10 years ago when you began your weight loss Journey go get some addiction treatment and come back when you're actually ready to change before you start giving people advice anyway I can't stress this enough none of this is about willpower think of willpower as a finite resource you only have a certain number of willpower points that you can spend in a day and that changes based on how stressed you are the way you

actually fight an addiction is to design your life in a way so that you don't have to constantly burn your willpower power just to make it through your day some of that will be accomplished by doing psychological work but I think that usually working with addictions you got to fix that underlying stuff and the good news is that the addiction often times melts away on its own if you do the rest of the work amberlin would not have to constantly burn her willpower regulating her emotions if she treated her unresolved psychological issues also managing willpower

drained by doing stuff like keeping junk food out of the house or at least keeping it out of eyesight helps because every time you see junk food your brain has to resist not eating it that burns your willpower and takes energy away that you're supposed to have for other things which is why bodybuilders meal prep when they're cutting weight having to deal with the significant stress of weight loss is Tough Enough so bodybuilders cook everything in advance and pre-measure everything so they have to do as little thinking as possible and burn as little willpower as

possible when they're in a time of stress if you start organizing your life in a way that saves willpower then you'll find it much easier to accomplish difficult tasks and it will also be much easier to stop yourself from engaging in behaviors that you know you shouldn't be engaging in anyway thanks for watching follow me on Twitter and I'll see you in the next video