Shaved head is the best option, but going bald definitely negatively affects your attractiveness and makes it harder to get dates - especially when younger.
Hmmm... I shave my head and my experience with online dating is that it actually attracted women that love shaved heads.
Seinfeld fans will recognize the quote.
Interestingly in winter I often wear a beanie and people take a much longer look when greeting me while I have it on. I am not sure if it is because it forces them to focus more on my facial features for recognition or maybe they are trying to work out what my hair might look like underneath.
Regardless, losing hair and shaving my head did affect my attractiveness. Weirdly I think it also can be similar to the "grey-hair" effect where people attribute a sign of aging to greater experience and wisdom.
I wear a hat quite a bit now but it's more because I'm worried about the sun than anything else.
The person I responded to didn't mention physique, which can be influenced by lifting weights. Diet works to a certain degree (ie, you can avoid most of the really bad stuff and you will see improvements, but you probably won't end up as a fitness model). I think there's a good chance that the ability to stick to a diet is highly influenced by genetics, as evidenced by the fact that dieting is a notoriously poor long-term intervention, even though it is incredibly simple in concept.
The person I responded to specifically mentioned abs. Having visible abs requires an incredibly low level of body fat, which is not achievable my most people unless they take performance enhancing drugs of some kind. But, you know, the people selling programs and methods for achieving abs have a vested interest in this not being widely known.
As for sense of humor. I dunno. I guess you're probably funnier when you're in a specific state of mind (at ease, not stressed out, etc.). And I guess you can memorize some jokes and gags. But in my personal experience, funny people all tend to be funny in unique ways. As in, there's no way they learned their particular brand of humor from somebody else.
This conclusion is based on data with very poor controls. The success of dieting depends entirely on its macro and micronutrient composition.
Dieting also has poor long-term success because people see it as a temporary measure, and not as a lifestyle change as they should, ie. this is how I should be eating from now on. It's no wonder they revert back to previous body composition with that mindset.
Studies have also shown people vastly underestimate the number of calories they eat. There are numerous studies that demonstrate that people who stick to a fixed nutrition plan of X meals per day with decent portion sizes, and no snacking outside of meal times, easily maintain their weight long term. This doesn't require superhuman genetics or some kind of iron clad will power, your body compensates for small fluctuations above or below your caloric target.
Which isn't to say there are no more mysteries in nutrition science, but the basics are well understood and simple to adhere to. Most people just don't want to. I was in that group a little over a year ago.
> The person I responded to specifically mentioned abs. Having visible abs requires an incredibly low level of body fat, which is not achievable my most people unless they take performance enhancing drugs of some kind.
Well that's completely false. Abs are visible at body fat levels as high as 15%, depending on the underlying musculature. At 10-12%, even that's no longer a factor. These body fat levels are readily achievable. 10-15% is also easily sustainable and not "incredible" by any stretch. You can get abs just with a good diet without any exercise at all in fact.
Edit: go ahead and google image search "skinny abs" for plenty of pictures of skinny people with abs. You're telling me they're all on performance enhancing drugs?
> But in my personal experience, funny people all tend to be funny in unique ways.
Which they learned through life experience. Mimicking relatives and friends, seeing and retaining what they and others did that made people laugh. If you decide to one day change and become funny, these kinds of observations followed by trial and error are exactly how all the funny people you know became funny. Ask any comedian if their jokes just come naturally to them via genetic inspiration, or if they have to actually work at it. They'll tell you how many times they've bombed on stage.
You say (emphasis mine):
> Which isn't to say there are no more mysteries in nutrition science, but the basics are well understood and simple to adhere to. Most people just don't want to.
That's the catch, isn't it? You can't just write that off. Motivation is part of the equation.
https://www.quora.com/To-what-extent-is-work-ethic-genetic
First Law of Behavior Genetics: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
https://www.scribd.com/document/203690269/Three-laws-of-Beha...
In other words, neither genes nor your family environment while growing up can account for a substantial portion of your adult behaviour.
Energy balance is a simple physics equation. Yes there are adaptations as I noted in my previous post, but they don't change this basic fact, merely how conveniently it's achieved.
> That's the catch, isn't it? You can't just write that off. Motivation is part of the equation.
Sure, and why not make the initial conditions of the Big Bang part of the equation while you're at it? Then nothing is your fault or within your control, and you can just do whatever you want and blame god for the way things are.
Dismissing personal responsibility in your life is not a valid option. Your citations down below demonstrate that roughly 50% of variation in personality are heritable. Relinquishing the other 50% of your personal responsibility is a sure way to ensure that nothing changes.
Humans have brains. One of the things that human brains do when somebody reduces their caloric intake is that they down-regulate that person's motivation to do stuff. So yeah, you can't violate the laws of thermodynamics, but the energy equation is inputs minus outputs. If you reduce inputs but also reduce outputs, then you haven't changed the energy balance.
> Dismissing personal responsibility in your life is not a valid option.
Look, I agree. I initially responded to somebody talking about abs. Then I make a comment about diets being extremely ineffective long-term interventions. You disagree, but the literature on this topic is extensive. In fact, the fact that people cannot follow diets is just about the only reliable finding that nutrition research has produced.
You may look at a .5 heritability for something and think that leaves a whole lot of room for personal responsibility, so let me add some context. Height has a heritability of about .8. No sane person, anywhere, believes that a person has any control over their height. It is entirely your genetics and, absent severe malnutrition, random shit that happens in your life (possibly starting inside the womb).
A .5 heritability for conscientiousness means that, to start, 50% of your work ethic and sense of personal responsibility (rough common language approximations of the conscientiousness trait) are completely and utterly out of your control. Then, out of the other 50%, free will is one of many possible other things which exert influence.
Now, you may think, oh, well all 50% of that is up to the individual. But I assure you that it almost certainly is not. I could probably come up with dozens of things that would have an influence, but here are just a few that come to mind first: your income level, whether or not you have a chronic illness, how stressful your job is, how stressful your marriage is, whether or not you have family members who are ill, whether or not you have dependent children. All of those things go into non-shared environment and many of them are not in your control. But you better believe they influence your ability to take personal responsibility.
You are saying that just because I'm eating fewer calories, I'm going to have less motivation? That makes no sense. Sure, if I'm hungry (similar to if I am tired, upset, etc) I will have less motivation, but as long as my hunger is satiated, I don't see how that makes sense.
The real problem with us (myself included) these days is that we eat WAY more than we need. Cutting back to a more reasonable level should not be causing motivational problems.
It makes tons of sense in an evolutionary environment where your body is trying to keep you from starving. Less motivation means you save calories for things which are absolutely necessary.
You completely ignored that part.
Please explain how my body could be worried about starving if my hunger is satiated.
Your answer also ignores this part: > The real problem with us (myself included) these days is that we eat WAY more than we need. Cutting back to a more reasonable level should not be causing motivational problems.
How is reducing our calorie intake from WAY to much to just right going to make my brain start worrying about starving?
Also, if my brain is worried about starving, it should be MORE motivated to gather resources for, if nothing else, more food!
That makes perfect sense to me. Reduced calorie input = reduced energy intake = reduced energy surplus = more motivation to conserve energy = less motivation to expend energy. A lot of this might be psychological, but it might also be biological (for the same reason why fasting tends to encourage the body to store nutrients as body fat in anticipation of future fasting).
The key issue is we're talking about going from eating TOO MUCH to eating ENOUGH.
>Then I make a comment about diets being extremely ineffective long-term interventions. You [naasking] disagree
Nope. naasking did not disagree. Here is what they said:
> from naasking
> Dieting also has poor long-term success because people see it as a temporary measure, and not as a lifestyle change as they should, ie. this is how I should be eating from now on. It's no wonder they revert back to previous body composition with that mindset.
No, that's a last resort resulting from extreme caloric deficits over prolonged periods. In fact, fasting actually increases perceived energy levels over the first several weeks. Which makes perfect sense: if your body thinks you're having trouble finding food, it's adaptive to be alert and ready so you don't miss any eating possibilities.
Over prolonged periods of caloric deficit, your body down regulates hormones which lowers various metabolic functions so you use less energy in various ways (lower body temp, reduction in NEAT), but this happens over the course of months, and even this energy output reduction is easily staved off by deficit cycling, mild exercise and/or maintaining only a mild deficit rather than a steep one.
> Then I make a comment about diets being extremely ineffective long-term interventions. You disagree, but the literature on this topic is extensive. In fact, the fact that people cannot follow diets is just about the only reliable finding that nutrition research has produced.
That's not really what I said:
1. I said summarizing this research as "diets are ineffective" is the wrong conclusion. Diets are very effective when they're not presented as temporary interventions, which is how people often view them.
2. The research doesn't show that people can't follow diets, but that they won't for "reasons", among which are addiction to certain foods, emotional eating, and just general ignorance about nutrition. This is partly an educational failing, and partly because they simply have no compelling reason to care more than the immediate pleasure they get from indulging.
> Height has a heritability of about .8. No sane person, anywhere, believes that a person has any control over their height. It is entirely your genetics and, absent severe malnutrition [...]
Well you just said it there: nutritional choices by you or your parents have a considerable influence on your height. I also think you're overstating it by saying only severe malnutrition can impact your ultimate height.
> All of those things go into non-shared environment and many of them are not in your control. But you better believe they influence your ability to take personal responsibility.
"Influence" does not entail "determine". You know what else would have a negative influence on a person's sense of control of their life? Telling them most of their body composition, nutritional failings and overall health is out of their control. This too has been extensively studied.
In fact, better well being through better nutrition and exercise is consistently shown to be one of the best changes a person can make in their life, giving them back a sense of control so they can tackle their other problems. Pushing your narrative isn't doing anyone any favours.
So really, it comes down to laziness.
I got visible abs by balancing what I eat, lifting weights, and running. What matters at the end of the day is having the discipline to either control your diet, your physical activity, or both.
Surely you jest.
Similar situation for humor. Women consistently rate a sense of humor as one of the key things they are attracted to. Yet most men are not funny. Surely if all you had to do to be funny was follow X program for Y months, most men would be Dave Chappelle. But they're not. Probably because being funny is some kind of an indicator of intelligence that can't be developed or faked easily. And that's probably why women are attracted to it: it's a reliable, genuine indicator of genetic quality.
As someone who has been fat in what feels like a different life, and today enjoys a developed athletic physique, I find your comment ridiculous.
It sounds like the kind of self-delusion an overweight, unfunny person engages in to feel better about themselves while avoiding the challenge to be healthier, more attractive, or have a better personality.
People are lazy, lack discipline, and are surrounded by poor choices, these are the dominant factors.
Discipline, determination, motivation vs laziness?
This is pretty true for success in anything. Eat less, exercise more -> better body. Spend less than you earn -> better financial stability. Etc.
Certainly there are some who could never have abs. I doubt it's very many though.
- citation needed
Please do explain to us how super genes are required for one to develop abs or a sense of humour.
As someone who was seriously skinny and out of shape and managed to develop abs through consistent training and dieting, I disagree with this.
Sure, it is easier to develop abs if you are already in a normal BMI and have your diet under control, but after reading all your comments on this threat, I haven't seen any concrete evidence that one can't achieve those unless they have some special genetics.
Sounds more like an excuse one makes for himself to throw his hands up in the air and call it a day rather than actually implementing diligence and self-control.