6 ms·

Obesity is 100% calories in/calories out. Good thing I'm at a startup trying to help people eat healthy and in reasonable portions without feeling unduly hungr

Obesity is 100% calories in/calories out. Good thing I'm at a startup trying to help people eat healthy and in reasonable portions without feeling unduly hungry.

daeken 15y ago
Do you have any info on your startup? I'm way, way overweight (somewhere around 380lbs) and currently attempting to get myself into a healthy lifestyle. Anything that makes that easier would definitely get my money.
- heretohelp 15y ago
  I know you from your previous work, I'll be contacting you when we're ready for beta users outside of our original alpha cohort. Other people: keep my username bookmarked for future updates, I'll be posting the product on HN once we're ready for more publicity. Good luck on your weight loss whether you end up a user of our product or not.
moonchrome 15y ago
Sarcasm ? I mean I'm not saying that people crying about genetics and how they can't help it aren't just wining but AFAIK it matters very much what kind your diet consists of and how physically fit you are ie. carbs, insulin sensitivity and muscle mass are crucial factors, calories in/out seem waay to simplistic.
- vacri 15y ago
  It is too simplistic - the human body has all sorts of hystereses in it, and doesn't work on a linear scale with calories. That being said, improving diet and using appropriate quantities is a fairly common solution - if people can stick to it, they'll generally be better off.
  - heretohelp 15y ago
    If you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. The tricky part is in making it easier to eat less than you burn. Eating healthier food that better sates you inside some kind of structure will help you accomplish that. Our product will solve all of those problems as well as take the pain out of meal planning even for people not trying to necessarily lose weight.
- heretohelp 15y ago
  I'm 100% serious, the deviation between the highest and lowest metabolisms save for people with specific conditions like hypothyroidism is not a significant contributor to obesity.
  - moonchrome 15y ago
    What about insulin sensitivity and different sources of calories. Surely you aren't suggesting that eating a 1k calories of pure protein, pure carbs or pure fat is the same ? Even proiten/carbs/fat branch and have different effects on the metabolism and are required in different amounts for a balanced diet to achieve some desired effect. What about muscle mass vs fat tissue, they burn calories at different rates and require different kind of food to build. Calories in/out is just extreme oversimplification that doesn't help in the slightest and causes people to starve themselves needlessly because of bad intuition, also risking their health and ultimately achieving the opposite of the desired effect.
    - heretohelp 15y ago
      Much of that is addressed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3723464 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3723464 Our product accounts for a great deal of factors, don't conflate my over-simplistic agreement with the OP for a lack of dedicated research into how we actually plan to help others. Macronutrients and their impact on satiety are core to our product and to helping people eat healthier.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sipefree 15y ago
You fail to account for the variables involved in "calories out". Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left. A diet that significantly increases blood sugar will, in many people, cause a high insulin response and cause fat to be stored and only glucose to be burned. Essentially you're looking at this from the wrong way. For the body to grow in any manner, hormones are required (c.f. growth hormones during puberty). And for the body to have grown, excess calories must have been consumed. What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not. See Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes, Insulin Resistance, etc. So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place. Disclaimer: I've been eating Low-Carb/High-Fat diet that brought my steadily worsening weight issue to a much more healthy level (91kg to 75kg) through control of my blood sugar and appetite.
- heretohelp 15y ago
  >You fail to account for the variables involved in "calories out". The study didn't fail to do so, so therefore I didn't. >Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left. This is a myth as far as western society is concerned. No one in western society not near-death from anorexia needs to concern themselves with this. http://www.weightwatchers.com/util/art/index_art.aspx?tabnum=1&art_id=35501 http://www.weightwatchers.com/util/art/index_art.aspx?tabnum... > What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not. This is not true, you've been reading too much keto literature on leptin. I say this as someone who is a proponent of low-carb diets as a way of promoting satiety and controlling caloric intake. >So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place. I have a whole team of nutritionists working with us, as well as my own personal experience and research, I've gathered quite a bit of experience. Let me lay out a few things for you. Low-carb works, anecdotally (key modifier here), because it happens to push people into eating almost no empty calories. In a diet simply absent bread, sugar, and other empty calories, virtually everything you eat is contributing your satiety as well as your overall health. That alone will allow you to eat far less and feel fuller. Taking it that much further and saying that the entire leptin hypothesis along with the keto diet usually associated with it is somehow responsible for weight-loss when that loss could be explained purely in terms of eating healthier in general, is unscientific and unproven. Control for people who don't eat empty/junk calories versus people who stay strictly keto, and we'll have a better idea of what impact blood sugar and leptin have on the matter. I don't deny that insulin resistance has a long-term impact on health, but I sincerely doubt it has much, if anything, to do with short-term weight loss.
kahawe 15y ago
> Obesity is 100% calories in/calories out Generally, yes, you are technically correct. What I hate about where this train of thought often leads is: it is not human, at all. It ultimately makes all fat people look like lazy, greedy and stupid slobs because hey, the answer is sooo simple and totally obvious, right? 100% calories in vs. out! What you completely fail to realize is the squishy human part that makes a lot of people eat way too much and not move around enough. Food and food addiction (mild or heavy) can be very powerful escape mechanisms for underlying psychological problems and once you are caught in that downward spiral, it can be very difficult to find a way out of e.g. depressions AND on top of that shedding all that excess weight with potentially life-long damage already done to your tissue and skin. With fat shaming being a very widely accepted form of discrimination, it will take a LOT of courage and strength to lift oneself out of that hole, so I don't find it that surprising that a lot of people can ultimately not change and they hardly get any sympathy or healthy, positive encouragement, quite on the contrary, a lot of additional toxic shame. So there definitely is a lot more to this.
- heretohelp 15y ago
  Humans are maladapted for western diets and western surplus, it's not my goal to assign blame but rather to help people get around the natural limitations of day to day life. It's unreasonable to expect every human being to possess the knowledge of a nutritionist just to manage their own diets. Hopefully the product I'm working on will level the playing field.

Obesity is 100% calories in/calories out. Good thing I'm at a startup trying to help people eat healthy and in reasonable portions without feeling unduly hungry.

daeken 15y ago

Do you have any info on your startup? I'm way, way overweight (somewhere around 380lbs) and currently attempting to get myself into a healthy lifestyle. Anything that makes that easier would definitely get my money.

heretohelp 15y ago
I know you from your previous work, I'll be contacting you when we're ready for beta users outside of our original alpha cohort. Other people: keep my username bookmarked for future updates, I'll be posting the product on HN once we're ready for more publicity. Good luck on your weight loss whether you end up a user of our product or not.

moonchrome 15y ago

Sarcasm ? I mean I'm not saying that people crying about genetics and how they can't help it aren't just wining but AFAIK it matters very much what kind your diet consists of and how physically fit you are ie. carbs, insulin sensitivity and muscle mass are crucial factors, calories in/out seem waay to simplistic.

vacri 15y ago
It is too simplistic - the human body has all sorts of hystereses in it, and doesn't work on a linear scale with calories. That being said, improving diet and using appropriate quantities is a fairly common solution - if people can stick to it, they'll generally be better off.
- heretohelp 15y ago
  If you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. The tricky part is in making it easier to eat less than you burn. Eating healthier food that better sates you inside some kind of structure will help you accomplish that. Our product will solve all of those problems as well as take the pain out of meal planning even for people not trying to necessarily lose weight.
heretohelp 15y ago
I'm 100% serious, the deviation between the highest and lowest metabolisms save for people with specific conditions like hypothyroidism is not a significant contributor to obesity.
- moonchrome 15y ago
  What about insulin sensitivity and different sources of calories. Surely you aren't suggesting that eating a 1k calories of pure protein, pure carbs or pure fat is the same ? Even proiten/carbs/fat branch and have different effects on the metabolism and are required in different amounts for a balanced diet to achieve some desired effect. What about muscle mass vs fat tissue, they burn calories at different rates and require different kind of food to build. Calories in/out is just extreme oversimplification that doesn't help in the slightest and causes people to starve themselves needlessly because of bad intuition, also risking their health and ultimately achieving the opposite of the desired effect.
  - heretohelp 15y ago
    Much of that is addressed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3723464 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3723464 Our product accounts for a great deal of factors, don't conflate my over-simplistic agreement with the OP for a lack of dedicated research into how we actually plan to help others. Macronutrients and their impact on satiety are core to our product and to helping people eat healthier.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

sipefree 15y ago

You fail to account for the variables involved in "calories out". Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left. A diet that significantly increases blood sugar will, in many people, cause a high insulin response and cause fat to be stored and only glucose to be burned. Essentially you're looking at this from the wrong way. For the body to grow in any manner, hormones are required (c.f. growth hormones during puberty). And for the body to have grown, excess calories must have been consumed. What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not. See Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes, Insulin Resistance, etc. So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place. Disclaimer: I've been eating Low-Carb/High-Fat diet that brought my steadily worsening weight issue to a much more healthy level (91kg to 75kg) through control of my blood sugar and appetite.

heretohelp 15y ago
>You fail to account for the variables involved in "calories out". The study didn't fail to do so, so therefore I didn't. >Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left. This is a myth as far as western society is concerned. No one in western society not near-death from anorexia needs to concern themselves with this. http://www.weightwatchers.com/util/art/index_art.aspx?tabnum=1&art_id=35501 http://www.weightwatchers.com/util/art/index_art.aspx?tabnum... > What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not. This is not true, you've been reading too much keto literature on leptin. I say this as someone who is a proponent of low-carb diets as a way of promoting satiety and controlling caloric intake. >So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place. I have a whole team of nutritionists working with us, as well as my own personal experience and research, I've gathered quite a bit of experience. Let me lay out a few things for you. Low-carb works, anecdotally (key modifier here), because it happens to push people into eating almost no empty calories. In a diet simply absent bread, sugar, and other empty calories, virtually everything you eat is contributing your satiety as well as your overall health. That alone will allow you to eat far less and feel fuller. Taking it that much further and saying that the entire leptin hypothesis along with the keto diet usually associated with it is somehow responsible for weight-loss when that loss could be explained purely in terms of eating healthier in general, is unscientific and unproven. Control for people who don't eat empty/junk calories versus people who stay strictly keto, and we'll have a better idea of what impact blood sugar and leptin have on the matter. I don't deny that insulin resistance has a long-term impact on health, but I sincerely doubt it has much, if anything, to do with short-term weight loss.

kahawe 15y ago

> Obesity is 100% calories in/calories out Generally, yes, you are technically correct. What I hate about where this train of thought often leads is: it is not human, at all. It ultimately makes all fat people look like lazy, greedy and stupid slobs because hey, the answer is sooo simple and totally obvious, right? 100% calories in vs. out! What you completely fail to realize is the squishy human part that makes a lot of people eat way too much and not move around enough. Food and food addiction (mild or heavy) can be very powerful escape mechanisms for underlying psychological problems and once you are caught in that downward spiral, it can be very difficult to find a way out of e.g. depressions AND on top of that shedding all that excess weight with potentially life-long damage already done to your tissue and skin. With fat shaming being a very widely accepted form of discrimination, it will take a LOT of courage and strength to lift oneself out of that hole, so I don't find it that surprising that a lot of people can ultimately not change and they hardly get any sympathy or healthy, positive encouragement, quite on the contrary, a lot of additional toxic shame. So there definitely is a lot more to this.

heretohelp 15y ago
Humans are maladapted for western diets and western surplus, it's not my goal to assign blame but rather to help people get around the natural limitations of day to day life. It's unreasonable to expect every human being to possess the knowledge of a nutritionist just to manage their own diets. Hopefully the product I'm working on will level the playing field.