5 ms·

It does work. It couldn't not work. Each day of your life, you choose to do one of three things: 1. Consume more calories than your body will need to function

by pugets 2y ago

It does work. It couldn't not work. Each day of your life, you choose to do one of three things: 1. Consume more calories than your body will need to function 2. Consume as many calories as your body will need to function 3. Consume fewer calories than your body will need to function When you consume more energy than you require, your body stores the remainder as fat. When you consume less energy than is required, your body converts your fat into usable energy. Now obviously, this is an over-simplified explanation of nutrition. What you eat, when you eat it, how efficiently your body converts food to energy, and other factors will determine the little details. But the explanation I've provided is not nearly as over-simplified as "it just doesn't work." To make a comparison, it would be like suggesting that the financial advice "earn more money than you spend" just doesn't work as a method of saving money, on the grounds that some % of Americans who try to save money end up in credit card debt.

grayhatter 2y ago
So if understanding the equation about how humans can obtain and maintain a healthy diet/weight is as simple as you present here. Why doesn't everybody just do that? You say yourself, it couldn't not work. And yet there's hundreds of thousands of people that say it didn't work. Explain them, are they lying? I'd assert, the oversimplified explanation is misleading. It's only true in the same way that drinking cold water will help you lose more weight than warm water. True or not, reality seems to strongly suggest it's irrelevant
- rybosworld 2y ago
  > Explain them, are they lying? Yes.
  - grayhatter 2y ago
    It's more likely that hundreds of thousands of people are collectively lying, than it is that trying to find a solution that works for hundreds of thousands of different humans all with different needs, lifestyles, desires, capabilities, and understanding, might be a tad more complicated than just counting intake calories?
- pugets 2y ago
  Why assume people will do what’s in their own long-term best interests, especially after being presented with a short-term thrill? Pizza tastes better than granola. Grand Theft Auto is more fun than math homework. Having a Dodge Charger is cooler than having a Hyundai Elantra. Who cares about the costs? I can always fix my bad habits tomorrow.
  - grayhatter 2y ago
    > Why assume people will do what’s in their own long-term best interests, especially after being presented with a short-term thrill? So, human behavior is more complicated than just counting? Why would someone eat pizza instead of granola? Are there some physiological reasons for this? I wonder if there might be an evolutionary advantage for a species to develop the desire for high caloric foods? That sounds like something that would make it much easier to make the decision to seek out pizza, and much less likely to choose granola. Especially when you consider that humans are mostly creatures of habit. Saying just count calories is reductive to the point of absurdity. you can tell it doesn't work because it hasn't worked for society for decades, yet it's such an obvious solution no one stops to account for the astronomical amount of evidence that proves "just try harder" does not work on most humans. So, do you want to be right, or would you like to do something that actually helps humans improve their quality of life? "Just try harder" doesn't work, and it takes wilful ignorance of the evidence to claim otherwise. let's apply this same logic to writing code, we wouldn't have any more bugs if people just reviewed their changes before committing, and wrote that one extra test, right? Works on my machine, ship it to prod... what do you mean millions of computers now bsod on boot? Surely it was just that one extra test, and it's pointless to do staged rollouts or smoke tests or anything like that? Just never make a mistake is obviously asinine whether you apply it to writing code, or deciding what to eat. The difference being we don't have a millennia of evolution trying to convince us to write bugs. I agree with the premise, people are responsible for their diet their decisions and their habits. I just don't agree knowledge of that is enough for everyone to improve their quality of life.
rootusrootus 2y ago
> choose You're letting that word do some very heavy lifting. > To make a comparison I think the comparison is very weak, very superficial. The human body is way more complex than CICO. But your comparison does have some intuitive value -- there are more than a few people who consistently spend every penny they make, and sometimes more, just trying to survive. We don't see a lot of them on Hacker News, to be sure.
- grecy 2y ago
  > * The human body is way more complex than CICO* Genuine quesion - if I eat 1500 calories today and do a measured 2000 calories of work on a treadmill, where did that extra 500 calories of energy come from? Are you suggesting my body can create energy from nothing?
  - grayhatter 2y ago
    Generally your liver will store between 12 and 24 hours of calories in the form of glucose. After that, it's likely fat stores from adopose tissue (fat cells)
    - grecy 2y ago
      Right. So how can CICO not work?
      - arcticbull 2y ago
        I mean, it works in the sense that if you keep your calories out higher than your calories in you will lose weight. Studies show that it's basically impossible to know your calories out without indirect calorimetry (and updating it regularly, no less, since your BMR + NEAT can vary significantly over time and in direct response to contemporary efforts to lose weight) -- and studies show that humans are dreadful at estimating their calories in. So yes it works in a lab setting where your CI is pre-portioned in the form of milkshakes and your CO is measured via calorimetry. In reality though it makes people hella hungry and your hunger tends to increase in excess of changes to body weight. Which is why the average weight regain after loss is 80% over 5 years. So naturally it would seem we would look to develop ways to reduce our CI subconsciously. Enter GLP-1s. This is literally all they do. They reduce your hunger so your CI remains below your CO which studies show almost nobody can do without help. Yes some people are genetically going to lose 200lbs and become the head of Weight Watchers in the same way that some people are going to win the olympic gold medal in swimming. That doesn't mean that you are going to win an olympic gold medal in swimming and it certainly doesn't mean that if the average person follows Phelps' training plan that they'll get an olympic gold medal in swimming. Ultimately a treatment that works but nobody can actually maintain is a treatment that does not work. Hence GLP-1s. The question is why they are unable to keep their CI below CO. Not whether that’s how they lose weight.

by pugets 2y ago

grayhatter 2y ago

So if understanding the equation about how humans can obtain and maintain a healthy diet/weight is as simple as you present here. Why doesn't everybody just do that? You say yourself, it couldn't not work. And yet there's hundreds of thousands of people that say it didn't work. Explain them, are they lying? I'd assert, the oversimplified explanation is misleading. It's only true in the same way that drinking cold water will help you lose more weight than warm water. True or not, reality seems to strongly suggest it's irrelevant

rybosworld 2y ago
> Explain them, are they lying? Yes.
- grayhatter 2y ago
  It's more likely that hundreds of thousands of people are collectively lying, than it is that trying to find a solution that works for hundreds of thousands of different humans all with different needs, lifestyles, desires, capabilities, and understanding, might be a tad more complicated than just counting intake calories?
pugets 2y ago
Why assume people will do what’s in their own long-term best interests, especially after being presented with a short-term thrill? Pizza tastes better than granola. Grand Theft Auto is more fun than math homework. Having a Dodge Charger is cooler than having a Hyundai Elantra. Who cares about the costs? I can always fix my bad habits tomorrow.
- grayhatter 2y ago
  > Why assume people will do what’s in their own long-term best interests, especially after being presented with a short-term thrill? So, human behavior is more complicated than just counting? Why would someone eat pizza instead of granola? Are there some physiological reasons for this? I wonder if there might be an evolutionary advantage for a species to develop the desire for high caloric foods? That sounds like something that would make it much easier to make the decision to seek out pizza, and much less likely to choose granola. Especially when you consider that humans are mostly creatures of habit. Saying just count calories is reductive to the point of absurdity. you can tell it doesn't work because it hasn't worked for society for decades, yet it's such an obvious solution no one stops to account for the astronomical amount of evidence that proves "just try harder" does not work on most humans. So, do you want to be right, or would you like to do something that actually helps humans improve their quality of life? "Just try harder" doesn't work, and it takes wilful ignorance of the evidence to claim otherwise. let's apply this same logic to writing code, we wouldn't have any more bugs if people just reviewed their changes before committing, and wrote that one extra test, right? Works on my machine, ship it to prod... what do you mean millions of computers now bsod on boot? Surely it was just that one extra test, and it's pointless to do staged rollouts or smoke tests or anything like that? Just never make a mistake is obviously asinine whether you apply it to writing code, or deciding what to eat. The difference being we don't have a millennia of evolution trying to convince us to write bugs. I agree with the premise, people are responsible for their diet their decisions and their habits. I just don't agree knowledge of that is enough for everyone to improve their quality of life.

rootusrootus 2y ago

> choose You're letting that word do some very heavy lifting. > To make a comparison I think the comparison is very weak, very superficial. The human body is way more complex than CICO. But your comparison does have some intuitive value -- there are more than a few people who consistently spend every penny they make, and sometimes more, just trying to survive. We don't see a lot of them on Hacker News, to be sure.

grecy 2y ago
> * The human body is way more complex than CICO* Genuine quesion - if I eat 1500 calories today and do a measured 2000 calories of work on a treadmill, where did that extra 500 calories of energy come from? Are you suggesting my body can create energy from nothing?
- grayhatter 2y ago
  Generally your liver will store between 12 and 24 hours of calories in the form of glucose. After that, it's likely fat stores from adopose tissue (fat cells)
  - grecy 2y ago
    Right. So how can CICO not work?
    - arcticbull 2y ago
      I mean, it works in the sense that if you keep your calories out higher than your calories in you will lose weight. Studies show that it's basically impossible to know your calories out without indirect calorimetry (and updating it regularly, no less, since your BMR + NEAT can vary significantly over time and in direct response to contemporary efforts to lose weight) -- and studies show that humans are dreadful at estimating their calories in. So yes it works in a lab setting where your CI is pre-portioned in the form of milkshakes and your CO is measured via calorimetry. In reality though it makes people hella hungry and your hunger tends to increase in excess of changes to body weight. Which is why the average weight regain after loss is 80% over 5 years. So naturally it would seem we would look to develop ways to reduce our CI subconsciously. Enter GLP-1s. This is literally all they do. They reduce your hunger so your CI remains below your CO which studies show almost nobody can do without help. Yes some people are genetically going to lose 200lbs and become the head of Weight Watchers in the same way that some people are going to win the olympic gold medal in swimming. That doesn't mean that you are going to win an olympic gold medal in swimming and it certainly doesn't mean that if the average person follows Phelps' training plan that they'll get an olympic gold medal in swimming. Ultimately a treatment that works but nobody can actually maintain is a treatment that does not work. Hence GLP-1s. The question is why they are unable to keep their CI below CO. Not whether that’s how they lose weight.