Just because a rock falls down doesn’t mean it “naturally follows” that some rocks fall upward too. There is no way to invoke a system that stores excess energy as fat if there is no excess. Could some energy that is actually needed get stored as fat? Okay, but… Not for long, as the body would need energy, since it isn’t getting calories. Unless it is getting calories from food.

I went from 175lbs to 125lbs in four months during divorce proceedings. My metabolism didn’t change. I wasn’t on a new miracle drug. I was depressed and didn’t eat, and I took up running a 3.2mi circuit around the bay where I live.

To your point, I bet OP’s diet would help you bulk up, just not likely with muscle. Chow a few gallons of ice cream each week. Eat American fast food three to ten times a week. Put cheese on everything. Ignore the “added sugars” part of the nutrition label. My weekly intake fits in a single shopping bag. I doubt OP can say the same. They weigh 2.5 times my weight.

Willpower is much harder to muster for a whole year, and its exceedingly difficult to avoid bad calories in this country.

ETA: Ozempic isn’t prescribed because doctors found patients whose bodies are non-conformant to the basic principles of caloric intake. It’s because doctors know patients have no willpower, and its likely the only way they will accept to lose weight.

And our bodies are just machines. We can’t create fat if were using the calories we consume. I don’t really get anyone who “tries” to lose weight for years. If you keep putting more food in your body than you need, your body converts it to fat. The idea of since “strange reason” that a body won’t lose weight is silly. There’s just no way for a body to keep weight on unless they are taking in more calories than they are using. So if OP can’t bear to eat less, they need to get really active. There really isn’t a mystery here. Its math. If you only add to the equation, the figure only increases. This is a willpower issue. … Or maybe we found the one obese American whose body defies caloric mathematics.

I saw the same “barely” articles you mentioned that reference the CST as a source. They didn’t actually describe the event the way your discussion partner did. She supposedly stepped in front of his car, and his grabbing her arm seems more out of frustration. He didn’t save her from an accident. He was the driver of the car that would have hit her. He avoided an accident, got out of his car, grabbed the girl and “lectured” her. Seems like a slightly harsher consequence than necessary, but it does sound like an assault of some degree.

That said, I help people – and even in public!!!

This is correct. The folks adding these trackers to their sites usually have little to zero tech knowledge. They see a plugin or other way to provide them with the metrics they think they need and its “so easy” to use tag manager or the Facebook pixel.

I knew someone working for a nonprofit that was building out a form for indigenous troubled families, and they used both google and meta tools. Their intended cohort actively avoided it based on their initial finding that it was tracking them (they apparently had a tech person on their side of the table). This prompted a whole board level meeting, which resulted in the removal of the trackers, which were later re-added in another,less skeevy way, after the data they wanted stopped flowing) and the immediate enrollment in the program by hundreds of families.

In the end, they decided they need those tools, as alternatives were to clunky for them. Google and Meta make it seem easy for you, since they have much to gain and little to lose by making their data collection tools easy to implement. I went round and round with my friend about how bad this was, and they got it, but their higher-ups overrode them.

And Meta and Google lived happily ever after…