12 ms·

I was just saying the exact same thing to my wife yesterday. We’re both trying to lose weight, for the millionth time in the 20 years we’ve been together. Exasp

I was just saying the exact same thing to my wife yesterday. We’re both trying to lose weight, for the millionth time in the 20 years we’ve been together. Exasperated, I just said “I don’t get it. I was an artist who had no technical background, and was able to teach myself computer science and now I’m a highly successful engineer. I did that. And yet I can’t lose 10 pounds to save my life.” It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it.

scarmig 4y ago
> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. When I started taking semaglutide, I finally understood it. I'd eat a salad... and be full and more than satisfied! I'd look at a muffin right after lunch, and go "eh, better things to do with my time" instead of immediately having an overriding desire to eat eat eat. Before, I could eat half a pizza and still be hungry (way out of what my body needs); now, a slice is more than sufficient and satiety lasts well into the next morning. GLP-1 agonists makes eating healthy trivial and automatic, instead of a dieting state where you're thinking about food literally constantly throughout the day for months or years on end. Too many people are convinced that everyone has the same subjective experiences of hunger and craving, but it's simply not the case. Some people implicitly hold this idea because it's a convenient ideology that allows people to morally congratulate themselves for having a functioning satiety circuit.
- rubicon33 4y ago
  > Too many people are convinced that everyone has the same subjective experiences of hunger and craving, but it's simply not the case. Some people implicitly hold this idea because it's a convenient ideology that allows people to morally congratulate themselves for having a functioning satiety circuit. Where does this line of thinking stop? Is everything pre-determined by genetics? Is everyone who is smarter than me, just actually lucky that their dopamine system works correctly, and mine doesn't, and hasn't since I was a very young kid? I'm sure this response will get down voted but its an honest question. This line of thinking that everything is genetically pre-determined seems both accurate and somewhat depressing. It means that if I'm skinny and can't gain weight, I need to take steroids and lift. Or if I'm fat, I should take a GLP-1 agonist. If I'm underperforming in my career or school, I should take adderal or similar pharma solutions. What role does good old fashioned hard work and discipline have in this day and age?
  - tormeh 4y ago
    We’re products of our nature and environment. Belief in free will, virtue, etc. are useful beliefs, but they’re also just not true.
    - raspberry1337 4y ago
      Free will is a product of our nature.
  - nunez 4y ago
    I don't think _everything_ comes down to genetics, but a lot of stuff does, including the attributes you mentioned here.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    I didn't say anything about genetics, though I wouldn't be surprised if that plays a part. Might be how you were raised. Might be simply your cumulative life path leaving you in a particular state. Might be toxins in the environment. It doesn't matter; in the existing present, people have wildly different responses to food and diet. As for your actual question, it depends on the particular thing we're talking about. For obesity, we've tried telling people to do more hard work and discipline, and it's been a spectacular failure. Plenty of people who do work hard and have incredible discipline in other areas of their life fail when it comes to getting to a normal BMI. There are large subjectivities involved, but when I got down to a 22 BMI at one point via the hard work and discipline route, I was constantly overwhelmed with thoughts of food, literally every waking second; this was despite trying and adhering to probably a half dozen different diets. Most people able to maintain a constant 22 BMI don't experience this. This also is more common in our current society, for whatever reason (likely not genes, since we're close enough to our grandparents), than it was historically. This isn't some natural state of affairs we live in. So, bring on the drugs! If there are ones that help other things with minimal side effects, bring them on too. Everyone wins, because we end up with a better, happier, more productive society.
    - depressedpanda 4y ago
- tdeck 4y ago
  > Too many people are convinced that everyone has the same subjective experiences of hunger and craving, but it's simply not the case. Some people implicitly hold this idea because it's a convenient ideology that allows people to morally congratulate themselves for having a functioning satiety circuit. As someone who's always been thin and doesn't have a strong appetite, I couldn't agree more. I'm just enough outside the norm yo be able to recognize it. There are times when I simply can't force myself to finish my food and it goes to waste, but the upside is that many people assume that people in my body fat range are somehow virtuous for not "overeating". That's not the case at all - I don't eat particularly healthy, don't have any particular exercise routine beyond walking, and I don't limit myself. I just get full quickly and have a metabolism that burns what I eat.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    I applaud that self knowledge. It's always hard to know others' experiences. I have a friend who genuinely tried to help me lose weight in college with the typical advice and a lot of support: he had the strategy of just eating until he was full and then stopping, and he just couldn't get why that didn't work for me. But when he hit his 30s, he suddenly started ballooning up and suddenly couldn't put his strategy into practice, to his great frustration. Did his willpower dry up overnight? Nope; something else changed to upregulate his appetite. (I pointed him to semaglutide, and he's already halfway to returning to his college weight.)
  - wnolens 4y ago
    I'm in a similar boat as you. COMPLETE opposite experience as other folks, to the point of pathology. I could not overeat to save my life. I cannot lift weights and expect any growth due to lack of caloric intake. When I try to exceed 2k calories in a day, I find myself so full I need to lie down and groan for an hour until things move and digest. Force any more down and I'll vomit. I cannot concentrate with a meal in my stomach, so I wake at 9, eat ~500cal at 1pm, and leave the rest til I'm done work at 8. Sometimes I lose 15lbs when having a bout of constipation due to goddamn IBS. Every person in my life, friend or foe or family or partner finds it clever and completely acceptable to tell me I'm "too skinny and need to eat more". Others without my experience just don't get it. Glad these overweight folks have a tool to help them.
- Auracle 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but I'm a decently in shape person that tried semaglutide for reasons other than losing weight and I disagree. While I'm sure we all are a bit different satiety wise (and I've found it greatly depends on how much I've been eating overall recently), your experience on the drug is not what the rest of us feel like all the time. It's unfortunately normal for our biology to basically want to shove calories down our mouths all the time. I consciously pace my food intake every single day. I just had a huge plate of nachos, some christmas cookies, and a pickle...and I could still eat more. The only reason I ate that much is because I feel a cold coming on so I relaxed my usual limits. The kind of "fullness" you get on semaglutide isn't natural. I've never felt like that my entire life. The closest thing would be after something like a Thanksgiving meal, but that's more of a "my stomach hurts" than "I really don't feel like I can put more in my stomach." My sister in law is the skinniest, most in shape person I know. She's 35, has had 3 kids, and has abs, an ass she clearly worked for, etc. My wife (unfortunately) regularly compares herself to her and in this case also thinks like you, that it just comes naturally. She gave me her old phone so I could test some stuff on it as I don't have an Android phone handy. She didn't wipe it. MyFitnessPal was on there, and she was limiting herself to 1400 calories a day. Almost all of us work for it. Truth be told, and please hold your downvotes for this, I get a little upset when the rest of you get to have insurance pay ridiculous sums of money for a medication that makes it easier for you than the rest of us, side effects aside, and you think it's simply evening out the playing field. And it needs to be said in case my wife ever finds this: she's also ridiculously hot and even though she can't see it has, at times, been skinnier than her sister.
  - Blackthorn 4y ago
    > I get a little upset when the rest of you get to have insurance pay ridiculous sums of money for a medication If this was well and truly about the money you'd support it, because it's going to be cheaper than paying for long-term medical costs of obesity.
    - Auracle 4y ago
      Yeah, and that's a definite bonus. It's the attitude I've read from people taking it that grinds my gears - when I read the semaglutide subreddit it was full of people saying "oh, so this is what skinny people feel like." No, how you feel on the drug isn't how most of us skinny people feel. I'm probably somewhat uniquely qualified to make that distinction at the moment. The rest of us have worked hard our entire lives to stay skinny and now you all get a cheat. It's one thing if you recognize it, but it's beyond annoying if you don't.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. Learn to cook well so that eating out would result in lower quality meals compared to what you could make yourself. Once you're controlling what goes into your meals, instead of outsourcing it, that makes it easier to control portion sizes, how much fat/oils go into things (I've found that restaurant dishes have an absurd amount of fat in them even when eating at "good" places), how things are sweetened, what you can use as healthier substitutes and what not. You can eliminate almost all sugars with low to zero calorie substitutes, you can replace bread/panko/etc with low-carb flours, if you're frying you don't need more than a teaspoon of cooking oil, many sauces you can learn to make yourself instead of buying corn syrup and soybean oil-laden sauces from stores, etc. Make it a rule to not buy things that come in boxes, buy fresh or flash frozen ingredients and make things from scratch. Stay in the produce, meat and fish sections of the store and ignore everything else outside of things like spices, frozen vegetables and protein. Give yourself some leeway, too. You don't want to go into an all-or-nothing mindset, because that might lead you to giving up on eating healthily altogether if you break your diet. If you can find a way to treat yourself with something healthy that you like, that would be great. Sometimes I crave pancakes, despite them being nearly 100% carbohydrates. I eventually ended up with a recipe that substitutes wheat flour with almond and coconut flour, and to replace the syrup, a berry sauce reduction sweetened with erythritol. Barely any carbohydrates and the berry sauce is better than maple syrup, IMO, and goes with a lot of different meals. tldr: reduce the opportunities to eat unhealthily, and increase the opportunities to eat healthily, even if you don't take those opportunities all of the time.
- etothepii 4y ago
  There's a lot of words here so you took some time to write this. Who is it for? Why do you think this is a new/novel idea the person you are replying to, and others reading it, has/have not heard before?
  - le-mark 4y ago
    Indeed! > Sometimes I crave pancakes, despite them being nearly 100% carbohydrates. I eventually ended up with a recipe that substitutes wheat flour with almond and coconut flour, and to replace the syrup, a berry sauce reduction sweetened with erythritol. Barely any carbohydrates and the berry sauce is better than maple syrup, This reads like an elaborate troll, at that!
LouisSayers 4y ago
> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. It's honestly just what you're used to. If you eat tonnes of sugar and fat then that's what you crave. If you cut sugar out of your diet, after a while the amount of sugar you used to eat will taste wayyy too sweet. Same with fat - eating chips for example will leave a gross fatty taste in your mouth. 99% of food bought out will have a whole lot of oil, fat, and sugar in it. Eating healthy starts by controlling what goes into your own food. Cook and prepare meals yourself. Once you're in the habit of doing this you simply start to replace bad food for good. Don't buy junk in the first place, then you won't eat it. Always shop for food when you've already eaten (and thus not hungry). Slowly reduce / eliminate the amount of fatty and sugary food in your meals. Just drink water (seriously, just water, no sweeteners). Combine that with an exercise routine and you'll be set.
- tptacek 4y ago
  This would be more persuasive if it wasn't more or less the opposite of what current nutrition research suggests about fat and satiety.
  - depressedpanda 4y ago
    Fat and non-satiating carbs in combination (e.g. chips) is bad because you will consume loads of calories without feeling full. Most seed oils (i.e. fat) actually seem to be quite unhealthy. If people avoid that shit when being told to avoid fat in general, I think it's actually a net positive. Apart from them seemingly equating fat and sugar as equally bad, the comment was spot on.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      "Potato chips are bad for you" is a noncontroversial statement. "If you want to lose weight, avoid fats", on the other hand, is deeply controversial and probably wrong.
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    I think that many people discover a particular diet that works for them psychologically and expect that to be the case for everyone. I do wish that more people understood the basic research on satiety, though. I suspect more diets would be successful if people were eating ~2g of lean protein per kg of goal weight along with a lot (I'm not sure if people have studied amounts here) of dietary fiber.
jononomo 4y ago
Just eat only liver, eggs, and ribeye steaks -- you can absolutely stuff yourself and you will lose weight. The problem is that as a society we are sending the wrong message about what healthy food is -- nothing from a plant is really good for humans to eat. A diet of only red meat, however, will not only get you in phenomenal shape, but it will also clear up a dozen other major and minor health issues. It is the perfect human diet and it is a tragedy that this is not understood.
- SamPatt 4y ago
  I support anyone experimenting with their diet to see what works for them, but I wouldn't be so confident about extreme diets like carnivore working for everyone. Nothing from a plant is healthy? That sort of absolute statement flies in the face of history and common sense and I can't imagine it's true for all humanity.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    I honestly love the idea of individual experimentation. Like, there has to be a not-quite-scientific-but-almost-scientific approach that people can reasonably handle on their own. I'd love to see a book that outlines how to find the right diet that works for you. Like an operational guidebook showing you how to cut out specific foods, and how to watch for and observe changes to see what the effects are on your body.
- astrange 4y ago
  Hope you don’t have hemachromatosis.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    Next you'll be warning me about scurvy, lol
Gwarzo 4y ago
[flagged]
naasking 4y ago
> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. There are some simple tricks you can try if you're currently maintaining a stable weight. The simplest is to get slightly smaller plates. Your brain will naturally try to visually match what your old portions looked like on the old plates, but now the plates are smaller so you're eating a bit less. No other change in behaviour is needed to see some benefits, but of course going for a half hour walk after dinner and shifting more of the food you put on that plate towards greens also helps.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Ironically, we're just about to buy smaller plates for a completely unrelated reason. We moved into a new apartment and the cupboards are more shallow than our previous place, and our plates don't allow the doors to close all the way. So we're buying a smaller dish set that will fit. I hope that helps!
soheil 4y ago
It will be painful. That's probably the most important lesson you need to learn before starting. 1. log your weight everyday on a graph 2. eat very small portions, no carbs 3. when hungry force yourself to drink a large glass of water 4. drink hot tea at scheduled intervals 5. eat lots of popcorn, get the raw grains from Safeway and put them in microwave for 4 mins in a large bowl with a cover
- raspberry1337 4y ago
  Popcorn has loads of carbs, and low satiety. Eat boiled potatoes.
  - huffmsa 4y ago
    A potato is far more energy dense than popcorn. 2 cups of popcorn looks like a good amount of food, but it's only ~150cal. A good way to trick your brain into thinking it's doing a lot of eating. Source: worked for me. And is a basically daily staple
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  why hot tea?
erfgh 4y ago
You just don't want it bad enough. You like food more than you like being thin. That's all.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  There’s clearly more to motivation, dependency, and even addiction than just how “bad enough” someone wants something.
paul7986 4y ago
I was diagnosed with something a few years ago which if I didn't change my diet (no beef, pork, fried foods, no foods with preservatives, low to no salted foods, increase water intake to 3/4 a gallon a day & started eating fresh fruit)that in ten to 20 years id be stuck in bed too tired to do anything/ enjoy life. For me that forced me to eat healthy daily and it has almost healed my affliction upon religiously following such a diet.
- astrange 4y ago
  What do “preservatives” have to do with it? Most nutrition advice is so bad you basically shouldn’t believe anything anyone tells you, including, especially if it’s from an expert.
mstipetic 4y ago
You've trained your gut biome to expect a certain composition of foods, it takes a bit for it to calibrate to something different. After a few weeks you can easily get used to different types of food.

scarmig 4y ago

> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. When I started taking semaglutide, I finally understood it. I'd eat a salad... and be full and more than satisfied! I'd look at a muffin right after lunch, and go "eh, better things to do with my time" instead of immediately having an overriding desire to eat eat eat. Before, I could eat half a pizza and still be hungry (way out of what my body needs); now, a slice is more than sufficient and satiety lasts well into the next morning. GLP-1 agonists makes eating healthy trivial and automatic, instead of a dieting state where you're thinking about food literally constantly throughout the day for months or years on end. Too many people are convinced that everyone has the same subjective experiences of hunger and craving, but it's simply not the case. Some people implicitly hold this idea because it's a convenient ideology that allows people to morally congratulate themselves for having a functioning satiety circuit.

rubicon33 4y ago
> Too many people are convinced that everyone has the same subjective experiences of hunger and craving, but it's simply not the case. Some people implicitly hold this idea because it's a convenient ideology that allows people to morally congratulate themselves for having a functioning satiety circuit. Where does this line of thinking stop? Is everything pre-determined by genetics? Is everyone who is smarter than me, just actually lucky that their dopamine system works correctly, and mine doesn't, and hasn't since I was a very young kid? I'm sure this response will get down voted but its an honest question. This line of thinking that everything is genetically pre-determined seems both accurate and somewhat depressing. It means that if I'm skinny and can't gain weight, I need to take steroids and lift. Or if I'm fat, I should take a GLP-1 agonist. If I'm underperforming in my career or school, I should take adderal or similar pharma solutions. What role does good old fashioned hard work and discipline have in this day and age?
- tormeh 4y ago
  We’re products of our nature and environment. Belief in free will, virtue, etc. are useful beliefs, but they’re also just not true.
  - raspberry1337 4y ago
    Free will is a product of our nature.
- nunez 4y ago
  I don't think _everything_ comes down to genetics, but a lot of stuff does, including the attributes you mentioned here.
- scarmig 4y ago
  I didn't say anything about genetics, though I wouldn't be surprised if that plays a part. Might be how you were raised. Might be simply your cumulative life path leaving you in a particular state. Might be toxins in the environment. It doesn't matter; in the existing present, people have wildly different responses to food and diet. As for your actual question, it depends on the particular thing we're talking about. For obesity, we've tried telling people to do more hard work and discipline, and it's been a spectacular failure. Plenty of people who do work hard and have incredible discipline in other areas of their life fail when it comes to getting to a normal BMI. There are large subjectivities involved, but when I got down to a 22 BMI at one point via the hard work and discipline route, I was constantly overwhelmed with thoughts of food, literally every waking second; this was despite trying and adhering to probably a half dozen different diets. Most people able to maintain a constant 22 BMI don't experience this. This also is more common in our current society, for whatever reason (likely not genes, since we're close enough to our grandparents), than it was historically. This isn't some natural state of affairs we live in. So, bring on the drugs! If there are ones that help other things with minimal side effects, bring them on too. Everyone wins, because we end up with a better, happier, more productive society.
  - depressedpanda 4y ago
tdeck 4y ago
> Too many people are convinced that everyone has the same subjective experiences of hunger and craving, but it's simply not the case. Some people implicitly hold this idea because it's a convenient ideology that allows people to morally congratulate themselves for having a functioning satiety circuit. As someone who's always been thin and doesn't have a strong appetite, I couldn't agree more. I'm just enough outside the norm yo be able to recognize it. There are times when I simply can't force myself to finish my food and it goes to waste, but the upside is that many people assume that people in my body fat range are somehow virtuous for not "overeating". That's not the case at all - I don't eat particularly healthy, don't have any particular exercise routine beyond walking, and I don't limit myself. I just get full quickly and have a metabolism that burns what I eat.
- scarmig 4y ago
  I applaud that self knowledge. It's always hard to know others' experiences. I have a friend who genuinely tried to help me lose weight in college with the typical advice and a lot of support: he had the strategy of just eating until he was full and then stopping, and he just couldn't get why that didn't work for me. But when he hit his 30s, he suddenly started ballooning up and suddenly couldn't put his strategy into practice, to his great frustration. Did his willpower dry up overnight? Nope; something else changed to upregulate his appetite. (I pointed him to semaglutide, and he's already halfway to returning to his college weight.)
- wnolens 4y ago
  I'm in a similar boat as you. COMPLETE opposite experience as other folks, to the point of pathology. I could not overeat to save my life. I cannot lift weights and expect any growth due to lack of caloric intake. When I try to exceed 2k calories in a day, I find myself so full I need to lie down and groan for an hour until things move and digest. Force any more down and I'll vomit. I cannot concentrate with a meal in my stomach, so I wake at 9, eat ~500cal at 1pm, and leave the rest til I'm done work at 8. Sometimes I lose 15lbs when having a bout of constipation due to goddamn IBS. Every person in my life, friend or foe or family or partner finds it clever and completely acceptable to tell me I'm "too skinny and need to eat more". Others without my experience just don't get it. Glad these overweight folks have a tool to help them.
Auracle 4y ago
I'm sorry, but I'm a decently in shape person that tried semaglutide for reasons other than losing weight and I disagree. While I'm sure we all are a bit different satiety wise (and I've found it greatly depends on how much I've been eating overall recently), your experience on the drug is not what the rest of us feel like all the time. It's unfortunately normal for our biology to basically want to shove calories down our mouths all the time. I consciously pace my food intake every single day. I just had a huge plate of nachos, some christmas cookies, and a pickle...and I could still eat more. The only reason I ate that much is because I feel a cold coming on so I relaxed my usual limits. The kind of "fullness" you get on semaglutide isn't natural. I've never felt like that my entire life. The closest thing would be after something like a Thanksgiving meal, but that's more of a "my stomach hurts" than "I really don't feel like I can put more in my stomach." My sister in law is the skinniest, most in shape person I know. She's 35, has had 3 kids, and has abs, an ass she clearly worked for, etc. My wife (unfortunately) regularly compares herself to her and in this case also thinks like you, that it just comes naturally. She gave me her old phone so I could test some stuff on it as I don't have an Android phone handy. She didn't wipe it. MyFitnessPal was on there, and she was limiting herself to 1400 calories a day. Almost all of us work for it. Truth be told, and please hold your downvotes for this, I get a little upset when the rest of you get to have insurance pay ridiculous sums of money for a medication that makes it easier for you than the rest of us, side effects aside, and you think it's simply evening out the playing field. And it needs to be said in case my wife ever finds this: she's also ridiculously hot and even though she can't see it has, at times, been skinnier than her sister.
- Blackthorn 4y ago
  > I get a little upset when the rest of you get to have insurance pay ridiculous sums of money for a medication If this was well and truly about the money you'd support it, because it's going to be cheaper than paying for long-term medical costs of obesity.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    Yeah, and that's a definite bonus. It's the attitude I've read from people taking it that grinds my gears - when I read the semaglutide subreddit it was full of people saying "oh, so this is what skinny people feel like." No, how you feel on the drug isn't how most of us skinny people feel. I'm probably somewhat uniquely qualified to make that distinction at the moment. The rest of us have worked hard our entire lives to stay skinny and now you all get a cheat. It's one thing if you recognize it, but it's beyond annoying if you don't.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. Learn to cook well so that eating out would result in lower quality meals compared to what you could make yourself. Once you're controlling what goes into your meals, instead of outsourcing it, that makes it easier to control portion sizes, how much fat/oils go into things (I've found that restaurant dishes have an absurd amount of fat in them even when eating at "good" places), how things are sweetened, what you can use as healthier substitutes and what not. You can eliminate almost all sugars with low to zero calorie substitutes, you can replace bread/panko/etc with low-carb flours, if you're frying you don't need more than a teaspoon of cooking oil, many sauces you can learn to make yourself instead of buying corn syrup and soybean oil-laden sauces from stores, etc. Make it a rule to not buy things that come in boxes, buy fresh or flash frozen ingredients and make things from scratch. Stay in the produce, meat and fish sections of the store and ignore everything else outside of things like spices, frozen vegetables and protein. Give yourself some leeway, too. You don't want to go into an all-or-nothing mindset, because that might lead you to giving up on eating healthily altogether if you break your diet. If you can find a way to treat yourself with something healthy that you like, that would be great. Sometimes I crave pancakes, despite them being nearly 100% carbohydrates. I eventually ended up with a recipe that substitutes wheat flour with almond and coconut flour, and to replace the syrup, a berry sauce reduction sweetened with erythritol. Barely any carbohydrates and the berry sauce is better than maple syrup, IMO, and goes with a lot of different meals. tldr: reduce the opportunities to eat unhealthily, and increase the opportunities to eat healthily, even if you don't take those opportunities all of the time.

etothepii 4y ago
There's a lot of words here so you took some time to write this. Who is it for? Why do you think this is a new/novel idea the person you are replying to, and others reading it, has/have not heard before?
- le-mark 4y ago
  Indeed! > Sometimes I crave pancakes, despite them being nearly 100% carbohydrates. I eventually ended up with a recipe that substitutes wheat flour with almond and coconut flour, and to replace the syrup, a berry sauce reduction sweetened with erythritol. Barely any carbohydrates and the berry sauce is better than maple syrup, This reads like an elaborate troll, at that!

LouisSayers 4y ago

> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. It's honestly just what you're used to. If you eat tonnes of sugar and fat then that's what you crave. If you cut sugar out of your diet, after a while the amount of sugar you used to eat will taste wayyy too sweet. Same with fat - eating chips for example will leave a gross fatty taste in your mouth. 99% of food bought out will have a whole lot of oil, fat, and sugar in it. Eating healthy starts by controlling what goes into your own food. Cook and prepare meals yourself. Once you're in the habit of doing this you simply start to replace bad food for good. Don't buy junk in the first place, then you won't eat it. Always shop for food when you've already eaten (and thus not hungry). Slowly reduce / eliminate the amount of fatty and sugary food in your meals. Just drink water (seriously, just water, no sweeteners). Combine that with an exercise routine and you'll be set.

tptacek 4y ago
This would be more persuasive if it wasn't more or less the opposite of what current nutrition research suggests about fat and satiety.
- depressedpanda 4y ago
  Fat and non-satiating carbs in combination (e.g. chips) is bad because you will consume loads of calories without feeling full. Most seed oils (i.e. fat) actually seem to be quite unhealthy. If people avoid that shit when being told to avoid fat in general, I think it's actually a net positive. Apart from them seemingly equating fat and sugar as equally bad, the comment was spot on.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    "Potato chips are bad for you" is a noncontroversial statement. "If you want to lose weight, avoid fats", on the other hand, is deeply controversial and probably wrong.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  I think that many people discover a particular diet that works for them psychologically and expect that to be the case for everyone. I do wish that more people understood the basic research on satiety, though. I suspect more diets would be successful if people were eating ~2g of lean protein per kg of goal weight along with a lot (I'm not sure if people have studied amounts here) of dietary fiber.

jononomo 4y ago

Just eat only liver, eggs, and ribeye steaks -- you can absolutely stuff yourself and you will lose weight. The problem is that as a society we are sending the wrong message about what healthy food is -- nothing from a plant is really good for humans to eat. A diet of only red meat, however, will not only get you in phenomenal shape, but it will also clear up a dozen other major and minor health issues. It is the perfect human diet and it is a tragedy that this is not understood.

SamPatt 4y ago
I support anyone experimenting with their diet to see what works for them, but I wouldn't be so confident about extreme diets like carnivore working for everyone. Nothing from a plant is healthy? That sort of absolute statement flies in the face of history and common sense and I can't imagine it's true for all humanity.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  I honestly love the idea of individual experimentation. Like, there has to be a not-quite-scientific-but-almost-scientific approach that people can reasonably handle on their own. I'd love to see a book that outlines how to find the right diet that works for you. Like an operational guidebook showing you how to cut out specific foods, and how to watch for and observe changes to see what the effects are on your body.
astrange 4y ago
Hope you don’t have hemachromatosis.
- jononomo 4y ago
  Next you'll be warning me about scurvy, lol

Gwarzo 4y ago

[flagged]

naasking 4y ago

> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. There are some simple tricks you can try if you're currently maintaining a stable weight. The simplest is to get slightly smaller plates. Your brain will naturally try to visually match what your old portions looked like on the old plates, but now the plates are smaller so you're eating a bit less. No other change in behaviour is needed to see some benefits, but of course going for a half hour walk after dinner and shifting more of the food you put on that plate towards greens also helps.

danielvaughn 4y ago
Ironically, we're just about to buy smaller plates for a completely unrelated reason. We moved into a new apartment and the cupboards are more shallow than our previous place, and our plates don't allow the doors to close all the way. So we're buying a smaller dish set that will fit. I hope that helps!

soheil 4y ago

It will be painful. That's probably the most important lesson you need to learn before starting. 1. log your weight everyday on a graph 2. eat very small portions, no carbs 3. when hungry force yourself to drink a large glass of water 4. drink hot tea at scheduled intervals 5. eat lots of popcorn, get the raw grains from Safeway and put them in microwave for 4 mins in a large bowl with a cover

raspberry1337 4y ago
Popcorn has loads of carbs, and low satiety. Eat boiled potatoes.
- huffmsa 4y ago
  A potato is far more energy dense than popcorn. 2 cups of popcorn looks like a good amount of food, but it's only ~150cal. A good way to trick your brain into thinking it's doing a lot of eating. Source: worked for me. And is a basically daily staple
danielvaughn 4y ago
why hot tea?

erfgh 4y ago

You just don't want it bad enough. You like food more than you like being thin. That's all.

BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
There’s clearly more to motivation, dependency, and even addiction than just how “bad enough” someone wants something.

paul7986 4y ago

I was diagnosed with something a few years ago which if I didn't change my diet (no beef, pork, fried foods, no foods with preservatives, low to no salted foods, increase water intake to 3/4 a gallon a day & started eating fresh fruit)that in ten to 20 years id be stuck in bed too tired to do anything/ enjoy life. For me that forced me to eat healthy daily and it has almost healed my affliction upon religiously following such a diet.

astrange 4y ago
What do “preservatives” have to do with it? Most nutrition advice is so bad you basically shouldn’t believe anything anyone tells you, including, especially if it’s from an expert.

mstipetic 4y ago

You've trained your gut biome to expect a certain composition of foods, it takes a bit for it to calibrate to something different. After a few weeks you can easily get used to different types of food.