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> [...] you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday and > I never understood how simple it was before starting this. Sounds so trivial,

> [...] you should be eating fewer calories than your body burns everyday and > I never understood how simple it was before starting this. Sounds so trivial, but sadly true for a lot of things in life. You read and hear something multiple times, but you have to make the experience yourself to get your eyes opened.

saiya-jin 8y ago
Don't cheat, lie or harm any other human being in any way. Sounds simple enough. If all would be heeding this rules, we would have paradise on this planet. Every sane person must realize this when reaching adulthood. Rest should be treated by professionals. Yet somehow, billions failed, fail and will fail spectacularly.
notheguyouthink 8y ago
It's also massively dependent on the person. People like me, yes it really is that simple. I naturally don't even care about eating, and my metabolism seems quite active, as it's hard for me to even gain weight. My wife on the other hand, even just mentally, is another ball game. Food is a big part of her life, even just speaking emotionally. Then of course you have her cycle, which causes her normal urges to ramp up to 7->10. Also, eating.. pickiness too. I don't mind leftovers, hell I don't even mind eating the same thing for a week, two, etc. She hates leftovers and always wants freshly cooked. Also rotating food types, as it can't be too similar to what she ate recently. All combined it means that finding hearty meals (and now keto for us) are more effort for her than for someone like me. To no surprise, I have no weight to lose (I need to workout to even maintain weight), but it really frustrates her at how different our bodies are. She considers her food habits to be an "addiction" in large part due to how different her and my reactions are to food. Her struggles are far more than mine on this front.
- ska 8y ago
  Simple is not the same thing as easy. Mostly "diet plans" are basically psychological tools to help you do a difficult but simple thing.
  - notheguyouthink 8y ago
    Yes, I did not say easy. I guess my point was, for my wife it's not that simple. For me, it is that simple. My point was that for my wife, there are a ton of other considerations she deals with. Sure, they're mainly in her head (though possibly other factors such as gut biome play a role), but large she has more details to factor in when she thinks about "will I be able to do this?". I on the other hand don't. For me, it's exactly as the author described, simple. Yes, simple does not mean easy, but saying quitting smoking is simple to a smoker is not an honest assessment of their situation. Most things in life are simple if you ignore reality and speak of life from a bubble.
    - ska 8y ago
      I would disagree on that. Quitting smoking is a fairly simple thing, but it can also be a very hard thing to do. Such is the nature of addiction. So as such I find it very honest to say it is simple but hard, and focus on what makes it hard. Somebodies reaction to a hard thing may be complex, but that is more about them than the thing. Although as you note, there is a risk of oversimplifying (e.g. your example of possible implications of gut biome, but that doesn't really shift the fundamentals). The reason I think this distinction is a good one to make is the problem with the converse. If something being hard implies it is complex, it will lead often to people generating extraneous complexity around it which makes it actually more difficult for the people involved, and can lead to very convoluted thinking and errors in that thinking. You need only look at the massive industries built around things like weight loss and quitting smoking to see examples of this (not that everything in those industries is nonsense, but they do contain a lot of profitable nonsense). This had nothing to do with bubbles. The risk is that instead of supporting people in doing a hard thing, we raise false hope of making it easy.
      - notheguyouthink 8y ago
        Aren't most things "simple" by that definition though? It's all about specificity, right? Quitting smoking is simple, if you don't talk about ways to overcome addiction. Becoming rich is simple, just get lots of money - simple if you ignore all the complexities of the underlying problem. That's why I felt my situation and my wife's differed. Mine was simple because there wasn't an underlying pile of complexity. Her underlying "addiction" and etc are noteworthy items in her list of things she needs to do. It's simple if you ignore the problems, but if she wants to actually implement that simple instruction she needs to figure out the little details that affect her. So yes, it is simple if we're not talking about her situation with context and reality. Mine is simple in all contexts, in my opinion. Smoking is a good example imo on where our opinions differ. Smoking is super far simple in my mind, because many people can't just stop smoking (or rather, lack the willpower). So they need additional data, the simple instruction was.. imo, not so simple.
- Fricken 8y ago
  When I was a bicycle messenger I had to eat stupid amounts of food. I needed 4-5000 calories a day. I had to eat two dinners every evening, one after work and one before bed. If I didn't get enough calories down during the day I would wake up in the middle of the night with my body screaming at me to EAT!, and like a zombie I would head into the kitchen and make a box of Kraft Dinner with a cup of butter and inhale it. I did that for 2 years, and afterwards I developed an aversion to eating, I just got so sick of having to gorge myself at every meal, and never being able to go more than a few hours without thinking about food.
  - notheguyouthink 8y ago
    A bit off topic; I'd actively not eat two or three meals a day if I could. I don't find it enjoyable generally, just a waste of time. I love food, but I don't always eat the food I love, so the ones I'm not loving I'd just rather not eat lol. Generally it's not worth the time or money to me. I'm the type of person Soylent advertises to. I even made my own for a ~year. Keto (mostly low carb for me, not keto) has been a massive boon though. Fats just leave me so much more sated and stable. I highly recommend it if you don't like to eat or want to eat more dense meals.
tzahola 8y ago
>You read and hear something multiple times, but you have to make the experience yourself to get your eyes opened. "You can't tell people anything" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703
Delmania 8y ago
Well, this is another one of those weight loss articles that tries to say "calories in, calories out" and then laughs at the research that refutes that. I'm referring to this: >There’s a lot of “science” that say low insulin levels in the fasted state lead to more fat burning. That "science" he smirks at is the research primarily of Dr. Jason Fung, who specializes in diabetes and obesity. He wrote a book called the obesity code that advocates for intermittent fasting. I think I'll take the word of a man who has spent hours researching and analyzing over the snarky comments of some software engineer. Some more examples: > If you’re in a caloric deficit this will happen anyways. That's not true. I could eat a reduced caloric deficit of bread every day and still not burn fat. The basis of intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet is to force your body to break fat for energy as opposed to carbs. They take different approaches, but the end result is the same - to lower the amount of insulin. Keto is bit more restrictive in food because so much of the carbs in out food is sugar. So, why did achieve results? Easy: > I naturally started eating healthy foods because I could eat more of them. If you eat a chocolate bar, you will still be hungry. For the same amount of calories, you could eat a few bowls of vegetables and be full. That said, the best part about this overall approach is that you can still eat whatever you want – just count the calories. There's a wide difference between how your body reacts to 100 calories of chocolate bars (sugar) and 100 calories of broccoli (fiber). This is more junk science and using anecdotal data as opposed to research and science. If you want to lose weight, what you eat is just as important as how much you eat. End of story; caloric restriction alone isn't enough. However, this article is also incredibly short sighted. Losing weight is very much like getting married. People focus on the event and not the afterwards. You can't modify your diet, hit your target weight, and then stop. You need to keep going; fighting obesity is life long battle. I believe the majority of people who lose weight will regain that weight within 7 years. There's horror stories from the biggest loser. My story, by the way, is that when I got married, I was 280 lbs. One night, I remember coming home from my in-laws house and deciding I was tired of being fat. I changed my diet. I cut out chips and soda at lunch and put in carrots and water. I stopped eating white bread and pasta in favor of whole grain foods. I cut the number of nights I had dessert to 1 to 2 a week. I picked up regular exercise. I tracked and measured my food. It worked. At my lowest, I was ~170 lbs. It's gone back up to 203 right now, but that's because I'm currently focusing on strength training. I will say that eating less is not enough. You have to pick the right food. As a friend of mine once wisely said, you simply cannot outwork a crappy diet.
hrktb 8y ago
> Sounds so trivial, but sadly true for a lot of things in life It's often not that trivial, nor true. There's a ton of litterature on the subject, here is an articla I like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/28/why-the-most-popular-rule-of-weight-loss-is-completely-wrong/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c23e40d15106 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/28/why-t... A good quote: > The much bigger mistake Wishnofsky made was misunderstanding how our bodies react to weight loss. As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight." > The reason Wishnofsky, and so many others since, have botched this biological fact is that it's fairly counterintuitive Basically our bodies are not simple in any way, in particular when it comes to how it handles energy, which is core to our survival. There is a good amount of survivor bias in all the "that's how I lost weight" tales floating around.
- wukerplank 8y ago
  Yes, rigorous fasting might also lead to muscle loss, additionally slowing down the weight loss. All of the people I know who did reasonable carb counting, stuck to a 8 to 16 hours feeding/fasting period and picked up physical activity (n ~= 5) lost weight in the 5-10kg area. Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that there are other simple life rules that feel like an epiphany while sounding trivial, e.g. "How I got rid of my debt by spending less than I earn."
- tom_mellior 8y ago
  > As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight." This is also discussed in the Hacker's Diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker's_Diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker's_Diet / https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/, free ebook and accompanying software). There seems to be a plateau around your "normal" lifestyle on which the body adjusts to small differences in calories in and out. You have to push the difference beyond a certain threshold to actually make a difference: "If you eat a little too much, the body cranks up the burn rate a little: you feel warmer and more inclined to run up a flight of stairs rather than walk. If you eat a tad less than ideal, you may feel chilly and inclined to curl up with a book under the blankets and get a little extra sleep. [...] To achieve weight loss, you have to reduce what goes in below your capacity to adjust by banking the metabolic fires, forcing your body to tap its reserves[.]"
toomanybeersies 8y ago
I think we need to start treating obesity like we would mental illness. We've finally, as a general society, grown out of telling people with clinical depression to just cheer up. Yet we tell obese people to "just eat less". I think most obese people realise that if they want to lose weight they need to eat less.
- wukerplank 8y ago
  I totally agree! You know, for morbidly obese people there is the possibility of stomach stapling. This physically prohibits over eating and lowers how much hunger you feel. The intervention is covered by the public health insurance in my country. And it comes with psychological supervision. The background is that to a lot of obese people, eating is a coping mechanism and it turns out they get depressed when they no longer can eat as much as they used to.
  - Someone1234 8y ago
    Stomach stapling only limits food consumption, it is very easy to maintain an obese body weight with liquid calories alone (soda for one example). I've know people personally who had the surgery and are still obese.
    - wukerplank 8y ago
      Did they also have psychological guidance? I guess you can still destroy yourself, even with a smaller stomach.
  - lostapathy 8y ago
    The long-term results of various "stomach shrinking surgeries" are not actually that great. People experience a ton of weight loss quickly, yes, but tend to gain a lot of it back over time as they never really adjusted their habits.
- bonesss 8y ago
  Arguably, if we had better policies and handling of mental health we'd see a lot less people eating their pain away...
tim333 8y ago
A simple illustration that things are more complicated is that most people go roughly from weighing nothing much at conception, 8 or so lbs at birth and 150lbs or so at 18 regardless of calorie counting. It's mostly under genetic and hormonal control at those stages and identical twins come out much the same weight. As adults it's more a mix of factors.

saiya-jin 8y ago

Don't cheat, lie or harm any other human being in any way. Sounds simple enough. If all would be heeding this rules, we would have paradise on this planet. Every sane person must realize this when reaching adulthood. Rest should be treated by professionals. Yet somehow, billions failed, fail and will fail spectacularly.

notheguyouthink 8y ago

It's also massively dependent on the person. People like me, yes it really is that simple. I naturally don't even care about eating, and my metabolism seems quite active, as it's hard for me to even gain weight. My wife on the other hand, even just mentally, is another ball game. Food is a big part of her life, even just speaking emotionally. Then of course you have her cycle, which causes her normal urges to ramp up to 7->10. Also, eating.. pickiness too. I don't mind leftovers, hell I don't even mind eating the same thing for a week, two, etc. She hates leftovers and always wants freshly cooked. Also rotating food types, as it can't be too similar to what she ate recently. All combined it means that finding hearty meals (and now keto for us) are more effort for her than for someone like me. To no surprise, I have no weight to lose (I need to workout to even maintain weight), but it really frustrates her at how different our bodies are. She considers her food habits to be an "addiction" in large part due to how different her and my reactions are to food. Her struggles are far more than mine on this front.

ska 8y ago
Simple is not the same thing as easy. Mostly "diet plans" are basically psychological tools to help you do a difficult but simple thing.
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  Yes, I did not say easy. I guess my point was, for my wife it's not that simple. For me, it is that simple. My point was that for my wife, there are a ton of other considerations she deals with. Sure, they're mainly in her head (though possibly other factors such as gut biome play a role), but large she has more details to factor in when she thinks about "will I be able to do this?". I on the other hand don't. For me, it's exactly as the author described, simple. Yes, simple does not mean easy, but saying quitting smoking is simple to a smoker is not an honest assessment of their situation. Most things in life are simple if you ignore reality and speak of life from a bubble.
  - ska 8y ago
    I would disagree on that. Quitting smoking is a fairly simple thing, but it can also be a very hard thing to do. Such is the nature of addiction. So as such I find it very honest to say it is simple but hard, and focus on what makes it hard. Somebodies reaction to a hard thing may be complex, but that is more about them than the thing. Although as you note, there is a risk of oversimplifying (e.g. your example of possible implications of gut biome, but that doesn't really shift the fundamentals). The reason I think this distinction is a good one to make is the problem with the converse. If something being hard implies it is complex, it will lead often to people generating extraneous complexity around it which makes it actually more difficult for the people involved, and can lead to very convoluted thinking and errors in that thinking. You need only look at the massive industries built around things like weight loss and quitting smoking to see examples of this (not that everything in those industries is nonsense, but they do contain a lot of profitable nonsense). This had nothing to do with bubbles. The risk is that instead of supporting people in doing a hard thing, we raise false hope of making it easy.
    - notheguyouthink 8y ago
      Aren't most things "simple" by that definition though? It's all about specificity, right? Quitting smoking is simple, if you don't talk about ways to overcome addiction. Becoming rich is simple, just get lots of money - simple if you ignore all the complexities of the underlying problem. That's why I felt my situation and my wife's differed. Mine was simple because there wasn't an underlying pile of complexity. Her underlying "addiction" and etc are noteworthy items in her list of things she needs to do. It's simple if you ignore the problems, but if she wants to actually implement that simple instruction she needs to figure out the little details that affect her. So yes, it is simple if we're not talking about her situation with context and reality. Mine is simple in all contexts, in my opinion. Smoking is a good example imo on where our opinions differ. Smoking is super far simple in my mind, because many people can't just stop smoking (or rather, lack the willpower). So they need additional data, the simple instruction was.. imo, not so simple.
Fricken 8y ago
When I was a bicycle messenger I had to eat stupid amounts of food. I needed 4-5000 calories a day. I had to eat two dinners every evening, one after work and one before bed. If I didn't get enough calories down during the day I would wake up in the middle of the night with my body screaming at me to EAT!, and like a zombie I would head into the kitchen and make a box of Kraft Dinner with a cup of butter and inhale it. I did that for 2 years, and afterwards I developed an aversion to eating, I just got so sick of having to gorge myself at every meal, and never being able to go more than a few hours without thinking about food.
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  A bit off topic; I'd actively not eat two or three meals a day if I could. I don't find it enjoyable generally, just a waste of time. I love food, but I don't always eat the food I love, so the ones I'm not loving I'd just rather not eat lol. Generally it's not worth the time or money to me. I'm the type of person Soylent advertises to. I even made my own for a ~year. Keto (mostly low carb for me, not keto) has been a massive boon though. Fats just leave me so much more sated and stable. I highly recommend it if you don't like to eat or want to eat more dense meals.

tzahola 8y ago

>You read and hear something multiple times, but you have to make the experience yourself to get your eyes opened. "You can't tell people anything" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703

Delmania 8y ago

Well, this is another one of those weight loss articles that tries to say "calories in, calories out" and then laughs at the research that refutes that. I'm referring to this: >There’s a lot of “science” that say low insulin levels in the fasted state lead to more fat burning. That "science" he smirks at is the research primarily of Dr. Jason Fung, who specializes in diabetes and obesity. He wrote a book called the obesity code that advocates for intermittent fasting. I think I'll take the word of a man who has spent hours researching and analyzing over the snarky comments of some software engineer. Some more examples: > If you’re in a caloric deficit this will happen anyways. That's not true. I could eat a reduced caloric deficit of bread every day and still not burn fat. The basis of intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet is to force your body to break fat for energy as opposed to carbs. They take different approaches, but the end result is the same - to lower the amount of insulin. Keto is bit more restrictive in food because so much of the carbs in out food is sugar. So, why did achieve results? Easy: > I naturally started eating healthy foods because I could eat more of them. If you eat a chocolate bar, you will still be hungry. For the same amount of calories, you could eat a few bowls of vegetables and be full. That said, the best part about this overall approach is that you can still eat whatever you want – just count the calories. There's a wide difference between how your body reacts to 100 calories of chocolate bars (sugar) and 100 calories of broccoli (fiber). This is more junk science and using anecdotal data as opposed to research and science. If you want to lose weight, what you eat is just as important as how much you eat. End of story; caloric restriction alone isn't enough. However, this article is also incredibly short sighted. Losing weight is very much like getting married. People focus on the event and not the afterwards. You can't modify your diet, hit your target weight, and then stop. You need to keep going; fighting obesity is life long battle. I believe the majority of people who lose weight will regain that weight within 7 years. There's horror stories from the biggest loser. My story, by the way, is that when I got married, I was 280 lbs. One night, I remember coming home from my in-laws house and deciding I was tired of being fat. I changed my diet. I cut out chips and soda at lunch and put in carrots and water. I stopped eating white bread and pasta in favor of whole grain foods. I cut the number of nights I had dessert to 1 to 2 a week. I picked up regular exercise. I tracked and measured my food. It worked. At my lowest, I was ~170 lbs. It's gone back up to 203 right now, but that's because I'm currently focusing on strength training. I will say that eating less is not enough. You have to pick the right food. As a friend of mine once wisely said, you simply cannot outwork a crappy diet.

hrktb 8y ago

> Sounds so trivial, but sadly true for a lot of things in life It's often not that trivial, nor true. There's a ton of litterature on the subject, here is an articla I like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/28/why-the-most-popular-rule-of-weight-loss-is-completely-wrong/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c23e40d15106 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/28/why-t... A good quote: > The much bigger mistake Wishnofsky made was misunderstanding how our bodies react to weight loss. As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight." > The reason Wishnofsky, and so many others since, have botched this biological fact is that it's fairly counterintuitive Basically our bodies are not simple in any way, in particular when it comes to how it handles energy, which is core to our survival. There is a good amount of survivor bias in all the "that's how I lost weight" tales floating around.

wukerplank 8y ago
Yes, rigorous fasting might also lead to muscle loss, additionally slowing down the weight loss. All of the people I know who did reasonable carb counting, stuck to a 8 to 16 hours feeding/fasting period and picked up physical activity (n ~= 5) lost weight in the 5-10kg area. Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that there are other simple life rules that feel like an epiphany while sounding trivial, e.g. "How I got rid of my debt by spending less than I earn."
tom_mellior 8y ago
> As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight." This is also discussed in the Hacker's Diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker's_Diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker's_Diet / https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/, free ebook and accompanying software). There seems to be a plateau around your "normal" lifestyle on which the body adjusts to small differences in calories in and out. You have to push the difference beyond a certain threshold to actually make a difference: "If you eat a little too much, the body cranks up the burn rate a little: you feel warmer and more inclined to run up a flight of stairs rather than walk. If you eat a tad less than ideal, you may feel chilly and inclined to curl up with a book under the blankets and get a little extra sleep. [...] To achieve weight loss, you have to reduce what goes in below your capacity to adjust by banking the metabolic fires, forcing your body to tap its reserves[.]"

toomanybeersies 8y ago

I think we need to start treating obesity like we would mental illness. We've finally, as a general society, grown out of telling people with clinical depression to just cheer up. Yet we tell obese people to "just eat less". I think most obese people realise that if they want to lose weight they need to eat less.

wukerplank 8y ago
I totally agree! You know, for morbidly obese people there is the possibility of stomach stapling. This physically prohibits over eating and lowers how much hunger you feel. The intervention is covered by the public health insurance in my country. And it comes with psychological supervision. The background is that to a lot of obese people, eating is a coping mechanism and it turns out they get depressed when they no longer can eat as much as they used to.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Stomach stapling only limits food consumption, it is very easy to maintain an obese body weight with liquid calories alone (soda for one example). I've know people personally who had the surgery and are still obese.
  - wukerplank 8y ago
    Did they also have psychological guidance? I guess you can still destroy yourself, even with a smaller stomach.
- lostapathy 8y ago
  The long-term results of various "stomach shrinking surgeries" are not actually that great. People experience a ton of weight loss quickly, yes, but tend to gain a lot of it back over time as they never really adjusted their habits.
bonesss 8y ago
Arguably, if we had better policies and handling of mental health we'd see a lot less people eating their pain away...

tim333 8y ago

A simple illustration that things are more complicated is that most people go roughly from weighing nothing much at conception, 8 or so lbs at birth and 150lbs or so at 18 regardless of calorie counting. It's mostly under genetic and hormonal control at those stages and identical twins come out much the same weight. As adults it's more a mix of factors.