My larger-bodied theory is that the "work-week" & all of its over-regulated time tables, don't properly co-relate to most people's biological needs. "Rushed" anything is seen as negative, I've never felt good a single minute when the word "rush" was in my head. With a work-week regulation of everything is the expectation, fall off the horse & your troubles become worse. Your peer evaluation goes down, the work will not be offloaded or considered too much for one person, it is compounded, or you must act like an "ubermensch" for as long as it takes to get caught up. Remembering that you fell off the horse precisely because of the weight you carried without these extra burdens, you must now "rush". I thinked the mental directive, "rush", triggers over-feeding because of it's base narrative of "need", which has overlap with survival instincts. This is the pyschological feed that turns the modern worker into a slave. Constant retriggering of the "need" directive, makes of man a mule & a yoke.
I also posit that overall population feeling is transferrable, at least for high-contact groups. Which is most to all people. Telepathy or not, I can feel the anxiety of someone through all of their cues & I pay the cost of giving my "attention" to their "direction" by inheriting a distinct percentage of their feeling, depending on my attention input weight. When people feel aggressive, their peers feel aggressed by inheriting a bit of the aggression. This is a telephone game, where average response to high stimulation by those whose "need" directives are perpetually retriggering decides the overall feeling state of those with professions that require high-contact & high #'s of people met per day.
Persistence wears down resistance,
eventually the body's natural weight regulation "capacitors" break, or at least conform to the new norm, hence the semi-permanence of weight gain after the initial deflowering of the non-obese individual.
This secondary theory could use a lot of work, & costs a decent amount of energy for me to add clarity to, but I believe in everything I've written
Rewrote Elder Author theorum, to Long-term Success theorum & it's now mentally Kosher. I've seen the same pattern reflected in music, movies, & most art that traipses near scientific-emulation. The greatest artists can be so Machiavellian, pain-exegesis as the impetus, that they become magicians, potion-sellers. Once they are paid enough they rejoin the rational & shutup. We have a deal for regulating emotions in slightly fringe & treatable class differences. The problem that arises is that typically the well off & intelligent aren't all that interested in art magicians, since, "we can do it too". Thus we don't foot the bill.
The more enjoyable art classes I agree, involve striving stories, they ask you to reframe, but typically don't ask you to hold something nihilistic(at least for very long). I view good arts as meaning-bakeries(they made the dough, you bake the bread), that can help steer the muddied-mind. Art reward still favors the intelligent, as usual, but it's a collective attempt to allow boat-missers a second chance.
I'm currently living the "clinical & pristine" diet outcome that you have theorized would be worth studying. I drink only distilled water w/ a small amount of added electrolytles, & eat only foods that came out of the Soylent meal replacement boom(that also scored the highest on my [enjoyment, body-feeling, satiety, satisfaction, company ethics] matrix compared to their competitors.) eaten only at room temperature or above(I have a strong belief, from approximation by body reactions & a few co-opters in the form of Gwern & a few studies, that cold foods are not digested properly & may slow metabolism, thus creating whatever behavioral/biological domino effect that would have. Sub-optimal.).
I collapsed into this diet outcome after a ferocious bout with a feeling-set [depression, low-motivation, erratic eating habits, inability to formulate coherent strategies] that I recognized as externally motivated. I changed a few other things, but this was one of the outcomes that my BNN's gradient descent collapsed towards, I had never heard of microplastics or flouride being a nuerotoxin, which has led me to believe in the "mathematicians are often wrong about the details, right about the answer" form of epistemy. I think "something's in the water". It's a shame I'm not closer to the problem, but a few years ago I thought it was the gutter-or-the-grave, so baby steps I suppose.
If use is ever found for someone with my diet composition, I'd be more than willing to pony-up my bio-metric data. I have a strong suspicion that diet composition is well related.