I Say Again: Money Makes You Fat. Nothing Else.
I’ve had this notion ever since I moved to Thailand nearly seven years ago, in early 2020. I came here quite a lot in the late 1980s, spending months in the country over several different trips, and I can’t recall ever seeing a fat person. I’m sure they existed, but there weren’t enough of them to even register on my radar.
Then I came back to Thailand in 2020—nearly 30 years later—and all of a sudden, there were fat people everywhere. Mostly women. Almost no men. Always women. And I thought, What the hell happened to this place?
It wasn’t huge, huge, huge. It was more like America in the ’60s, maybe the ’70s, when women were starting to get fat all over the place. Same trend. So what’s going on?
I’ve thought about it a lot, and I had a conversation this morning with a longtime friend of mine. I’m not going to give his name because he’s kind of famous, and I don’t want to interfere with what he’s doing. We disagree on a lot, but we had a two-hour conversation on the phone, and I thought, Okay, I need to revisit this, because I disagree with him about the cause of obesity.
So I got involved, and Grok generated the image at the top. It perfectly correlates with my own idea:
Money makes you fat. Simple as that.
Money allows you to eat as much as you want, as often as you want, and the result is that you get fat. Some people are resistant, but a lot of people aren’t—probably at least a third or a fourth of the population, maybe half, can’t resist. So they just eat, eat, eat every time they want to eat more. And it doesn’t fucking matter what the food is.
That’s where I have the big disagreement with my friend. He thinks animal products cause it. He’s not a strict vegan or anything like that, but he thinks we’re more like gorillas than humans or something. I strongly disagree.
The good thing about animal foods is that they have high nutrient density in micronutritional terms. But the problem is that people eat them in macronutritional terms that provide more energy than they need—and then they get fat as a result.
It doesn’t really matter what the fuck you’re eating. It’s that you’re eating too much, too often.
And all of the diet shit we’ve been going on about forever—and I’ve been a part of it—it’s all stupid to me now. Especially all the low-carb approaches. Low-carb in any form, whether it’s carnivore, keto, or whatever the fuck else, all share one thing: They’re gluttons.
They want to find a way to eat however much they want, whenever they want, and not get fucking fat.
That’s stupid. And impossible. Especially for women.
Should you wish to dive deeper, here’s my conversation with Grok.
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I agree with some of your perspective, but I think obesity is a bit more complex than just too many calories. Obesity is defined as “excess body fat”, and you can actually be obese and thin at the same time! This is my somewhat unique perspective:
carbsyndrome.com/the-mystery-of-our-obesity-epidemic/
Same thing happened in Portugal. Visiting family in the 80’s, there were no fat people, despite food abundance. What correlated with obesity there, was supermarkets. Before supermarkets, most food was made at home from scratch. Pastry shops, that were everywhere, were a treat.
Once supermarkets arrived, obesity happened quickly.
I agree because supermarkets are loaded with ultra-processed food, and this food is the trigger for CARB syndrome which is actually driving the bus when it comes to obesity: https://carbsyndrome.com
This disease not only drives obesity, it is the primary cause of many common brain disorders like atypical depression, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, ADHD, and many others.
Yea, Olga, certainly a contributor. But, I’d argue, part of the same thing. Supermarkets could not be profitable with 70% of people being poor. When poor, you scrounge together your coins and walk down the street and buy a few things from the stalls. You can’t fill a shopping cart.
We have a second home in Greece, and we just spent a month there. Over there buying produce at the local weekly farmer’s market is much cheaper than the grocery store. There produce also tastes much better than in the states. They have a lot of obesity in Greece because most people shop in stores. In most countrie so-called “poor” people get some type of food assistance. What do they do with this food? By crap at the local grocery store, corner store, or gas station!
I can’t comment on elsewhere, but Portugal in the 80’s was plentiful. The only difference from now, is that unprocessed food was bought at the markets as ingredients. Meals are still often coked at home, but ready made snacks are everywhere and with a never ending supply. My parents’s home town of about 12 000 people has 7 grocery stores, 5 if them are supermarkets. Half the stalls are we mpty at the market where food used to be purchased.
Here’s the local “supermarket” where I live.
youtu.be/eTSFoL_KlsY
Wonderful! We have a second home in Greece and their weekly outdoor market in the village Anavyssos near us is wonderful! writercooksgreek.blogspot.com/2015/08/anavyssos-farmers-market-figs-and.html
“eating too much, too often”
Well said. I remember you started pressing this message firmly back near the peak of the Jimmy Moore wacko LC bubble, and it has stuck with me.
I even slipped up a couple years ago when starting to lift seriously and fell for the notion that more food = more gains. Nope, only a kernel of truth there, applying to increasingly rare skinny teenagers. In reality/adulthood, more food = more blubber.
Every single time I have lost significant weight, I was skipping a notable number of meals over the course of any given week. Or, occasionally, eating three much smaller meals per day.
And totally agree with the overall theme. We are hardwired to eat in order to avoid starvation, and these wires were installed in a world of scarcity. In the modern world of abundance, our only salvation from obesity is to put the brakes on consciously and intellectually. Passive/mindless consumption is the road to fatness.
As you shared previously, satiety is key, especially when food is abundant. That became my focus at the end of 2024 after years of overeating. Dropped 60 lbs of fat, kept the muscle and am enjoying a much better quality of life.
Well said Erick, and I agree. I have found this supplemnt very helpful when it comes to suppressing cravings for sweet and starchy food: carbsyndrome.com/product/carb-22/
You can also add extra L-glutamine for persistent cravings. If you stick to eating whole foods, the cravings also tend to subside.