4 ms·

A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar her

A lot of people seem to have a purely emotional relationship with resources which logic doesn't seem to be able to penetrate. Food and finances seem similar here. For years I tried to get my wife to stick to a grocery budget. That is, we have $n per week for all groceries. She'd blow badly over the limit every time. "But we needed [food]" or "These were toiletries, so they don't _count_ as groceries." Ultimately we never had an real success sticking to a grocery budget, and ultimately the solution was me working towards better paying jobs. This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it. (as and aside, there are also people who wrongly believe that calories in --> calories out is a flawed concept because not all people have the same metabolism, or not all calories are equal. Both of these are true, but none of them actually negate the premise. For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. It may feel unfair that someone doesn't have to work as hard as you to produce the same result, but this is actually true in all areas of life. Now that said, improving the quality of your calories is very important, and should not be ignored -- but it also does not negate the premise.)

2cynykyl 2y ago
Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of everything everywhere at all times.
- keybored 2y ago
  [deleted]
  - colechristensen 2y ago
    Not Society and its Discontents (1930), it's been going on as long as we have written records of anything spanning the history of civilization.
derbOac 2y ago
It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat, which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to lose weight. Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value. I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  Also there are ways to convince your body that it needs less, and the journey from A to B is very uncomfortable. If you do it wrong you will just endlessly be suffering from your body thinking it's starving. On top of that though is you have to get over your intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to eat.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    This is so dismissive it's almost condescending. I know how much food I need to eat in order to survive and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of food, I'm still hungry. Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches, which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak paired with an 8 oz portion of green beans or broccoli, and I still get the munchies just 2 hours later. I should probably go to a doctor and ask about Ozempic or something. I did successfully lose about 50 pounds doing keto and brought my A1C from 6.8 down to 5.4, but I damn near lost my sanity because I was always hungry. I've gained it all back and started to get some of diabetic symptoms again.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      I'm kinda convinced that something has changed (prescription meds ending up in the water supply? micro plastics?) that makes people hungrier than they were in the mid 20th century. the effort required to eat less seems higher than ever, and you can't totally explain the gap and rise in obesity with just lifestyle and food availability. if some unknown element was making everyone's internal thermostat aim for more food it would explain a lot.
mmooss 2y ago
> For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.
- everdrive 2y ago
  The body can compensate at the margins. Eat 5 fewer calories per day and you will see zero change. Eat 500 fewer calories per day, consistently every day, and you will absolutely see changes. (I'm not actually suggesting that it would be _healthy_ or advisable to drop your diet by 500 calories -- just pointing out that the body cannot compensate indefinitely.)
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The compensation is often lower energy levels. Your body compensates by keeping you from doing as much.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      yeah, you want to force yourself to do some activities that keep your metabolism up along with the restrictions you can't exercise out of a bad diet but exercise is a helpful supplement to a good diet too. it's just that making yourself do it when you're tired and hungry is draining.
      - colechristensen 2y ago
        >you can't exercise out of a bad diet You can, but it's not easy. People who exercise _a lot_ often have trouble eating enough calories. 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day is hard to eat and not out of reach. I knew a guy who was drinking a gallon of whole milk a day for a while to try to maintain weight.
        2y ago
watwut 2y ago
> they struggle with actually putting it into action [...] conceding to their cravings The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.
- everdrive 2y ago
  They're just acceding to an even greater emotional pressure; they're certainly not taking a purely sober and intellectual view of calories and health.
- Spinnaker_ 2y ago
  That's just a healthy relationship with food, not a risk for anorexia.
  - watwut 2y ago
    Healthy relationship with food does not involve restriction or conscious attempts to loose weight. You eat when hungry and stop when not hungry. The thing that makes anorexia possible (among other things) is you being able to ignore hunger. Healthy organism will instinctively eat when hungry or missing something. The instincts takes over, body produces hormones to override behavior and diet ends.
    - cullenking 2y ago
      Yeah but people in this conversation and other conversations about calorie restriction, are not arguing from the standpoint of someone being healthy, and then indulging in unhealthy relationships with food. They are talking about someone who has an unhealthy relationship with food and their body, demonstrable by their excess weight, and talking about ways to correct the poor health by having a healthy relationship with their own will. You need a healthy will in order to manage weight loss due to caloric restriction. I think a lot of people talking past each other on this topic are really just disagreeing about what healthy will power actually is. To be specific, comments along the lines of "it's not my/their fault, it's the fault of our environment, and the availability of unhealthy food". I think this is just having an unhealthy will. I think this is also the whole divide on things like ozempic - some people view it as enabling people to have unhealthy will power. Other people view it as the only way someone can have healthy weight. I don't think either party is wrong, I think they are just talking past eachother.
Spivak 2y ago
Oh hey, I'm the wife in this story. Having a fixed $/month budget for "things you buy at a grocery store" was doomed from the beginning. All the stuff in your house/pantry are on all kinds of weird replacement cycles that vary with usage and changes in habits. A monthly cadence also makes you sub-optimally plan around price movements. An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs. It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.
- everdrive 2y ago
  To your credit, our approach never worked :) I totally agree that you'd need to find a reasonable average weekly cost because costs and timing would vary. In my mind, this means you could find a reasonable average weekly cost that you often go under, and seldom go over. But, it just never happened for us. In principle we could have just kept raising the price ceiling, but eventually that becomes meaningless in the context of a budget. To me, at least, it felt just like calories; what could have been a pretty easy math problem was defeated by human psychology.
- 3vidence 2y ago
  I think this also summarizes the issues a lot for people on HN face. Oversimplification and over confidence in estimation. Engineers tend to do this a lot.
landtuna 2y ago
I never understood why calories in == calories out was relevant when we can't know how many unprocessed calories are remaining undigested. Here's what the bots had to say: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/weight-loss-gurus-often-say-ca-oZZg9RgkQXS3Gm4tmB9TcQ https://www.perplexity.ai/search/weight-loss-gurus-often-say... (FYI - I stay thin by limiting calories, so I don't disagree that fewer calories causes weight loss)
- ttoinou 2y ago
  This theory is not scientific (food is not energy, the body is not a machine, measurements are not precise etc.) so there is nothing rationale you can say that will convince people who believe in it to switch to something else
- nemomarx 2y ago
  cico is true, but you can't measure calories in accurately and you can't be sure of calories out accurately. isn't that fun? (in practice as you know, you just kinda do it on feel and end up restricting calories enough to lose weight. but my own intuition is that I had to aim for 100 or 200 less than my estimated BMR so the math is very fuzzy isn't it?)
keybored 2y ago
> This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it. Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand? That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all. Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large. If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through. The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.
wrfrmers 2y ago
Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful) because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your physiology, per nutrient intake. CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.
- Pigalowda 2y ago
  What happens if I ingest 0 calories for 3 months?
  - 3vidence 2y ago
    To parents point your metabolism will drastically change over those 3 months and the rate at which you lose weight will change. Additionally the distribution of your muscles and fat will also change.
    - wrfrmers 2y ago
      I don't know the mechanics, but my understanding is that such a water fast also permanently alters your digestion and metabolism. A (logical extreme) example I was thinking of counterig with: if you eat 500,000 calories in 24 hours on the first of the year, and nothing else for the rest of it, you'll achieve a 1,350 calorie/day average, certainly enough to lose a significant amount of weight. And you will! Because your stomach will have ruptured and you'll be dead by the 2nd. Rotting is one way to burn calories. (I mention this to illustrate how focusing solely on the numbers, to the detriment of the actual lived quality of life during the weight management process, misses the forest for the trees.)

2cynykyl 2y ago

Im reading Sapiens at the moment and one statement really got my attention: human society is a marvel, but individually we are embarrassingly similar to Chimps. This mental model really helps put put so much behavior into context, like resource hogging and the hoarding instinct, despite obvious surplus of everything everywhere at all times.

keybored 2y ago
[deleted]
- colechristensen 2y ago
  Not Society and its Discontents (1930), it's been going on as long as we have written records of anything spanning the history of civilization.

derbOac 2y ago

It's really hard (emotionally or motivationally) to undereat, which is what you need to do consistently for a long time to lose weight. Aside from the hunger issue, food is enmeshed in all sorts of value having nothing to do with nutritional value per se and everything to do with sociopsychological value. I think I've massively underestimated that in my own life, or misunderstood what that meant or something. I think the way it plays out is much more pervasive and subtle than what people realize. I'm not even saying it's wrong, it's just hard to suddenly deprive yourself of something that is meaningfully rewarding, and especially so when you're unaware of it consciously.

colechristensen 2y ago
Also there are ways to convince your body that it needs less, and the journey from A to B is very uncomfortable. If you do it wrong you will just endlessly be suffering from your body thinking it's starving. On top of that though is you have to get over your intellectual ideas of how much food you think you need to eat.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  This is so dismissive it's almost condescending. I know how much food I need to eat in order to survive and maintain a healthy weight. But if I eat that amount of food, I'm still hungry. Doesn't matter what I eat. I'll eat a diet high in protein and fiber, moderate in fat, and low in sugar and starches, which is supposed to be the recipe to feel full without eating empty calories, but it doesn't work. 16 oz steak paired with an 8 oz portion of green beans or broccoli, and I still get the munchies just 2 hours later. I should probably go to a doctor and ask about Ozempic or something. I did successfully lose about 50 pounds doing keto and brought my A1C from 6.8 down to 5.4, but I damn near lost my sanity because I was always hungry. I've gained it all back and started to get some of diabetic symptoms again.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    I'm kinda convinced that something has changed (prescription meds ending up in the water supply? micro plastics?) that makes people hungrier than they were in the mid 20th century. the effort required to eat less seems higher than ever, and you can't totally explain the gap and rise in obesity with just lifestyle and food availability. if some unknown element was making everyone's internal thermostat aim for more food it would explain a lot.

mmooss 2y ago

> For whatever your metabolism, and whatever your category of calories, fewer calories will still produce weight loss. I thought that wasn't true, that the human body stores and burns calories at varying rates based on many signals, and that our bodies or some bodies effectively conserve weight or caloric stores at a certain level.

everdrive 2y ago
The body can compensate at the margins. Eat 5 fewer calories per day and you will see zero change. Eat 500 fewer calories per day, consistently every day, and you will absolutely see changes. (I'm not actually suggesting that it would be _healthy_ or advisable to drop your diet by 500 calories -- just pointing out that the body cannot compensate indefinitely.)
- bluGill 2y ago
  The compensation is often lower energy levels. Your body compensates by keeping you from doing as much.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    yeah, you want to force yourself to do some activities that keep your metabolism up along with the restrictions you can't exercise out of a bad diet but exercise is a helpful supplement to a good diet too. it's just that making yourself do it when you're tired and hungry is draining.
    - colechristensen 2y ago
      >you can't exercise out of a bad diet You can, but it's not easy. People who exercise _a lot_ often have trouble eating enough calories. 5,000 to 10,000 calories a day is hard to eat and not out of reach. I knew a guy who was drinking a gallon of whole milk a day for a while to try to maintain weight.
      - 2y ago

watwut 2y ago

> they struggle with actually putting it into action [...] conceding to their cravings The trouble is that people who have no problems to do this ... are the ones at risk for anorexia. They lack the instincts that make the rest of us safe from that particular hell.

everdrive 2y ago
They're just acceding to an even greater emotional pressure; they're certainly not taking a purely sober and intellectual view of calories and health.
Spinnaker_ 2y ago
That's just a healthy relationship with food, not a risk for anorexia.
- watwut 2y ago
  Healthy relationship with food does not involve restriction or conscious attempts to loose weight. You eat when hungry and stop when not hungry. The thing that makes anorexia possible (among other things) is you being able to ignore hunger. Healthy organism will instinctively eat when hungry or missing something. The instincts takes over, body produces hormones to override behavior and diet ends.
  - cullenking 2y ago
    Yeah but people in this conversation and other conversations about calorie restriction, are not arguing from the standpoint of someone being healthy, and then indulging in unhealthy relationships with food. They are talking about someone who has an unhealthy relationship with food and their body, demonstrable by their excess weight, and talking about ways to correct the poor health by having a healthy relationship with their own will. You need a healthy will in order to manage weight loss due to caloric restriction. I think a lot of people talking past each other on this topic are really just disagreeing about what healthy will power actually is. To be specific, comments along the lines of "it's not my/their fault, it's the fault of our environment, and the availability of unhealthy food". I think this is just having an unhealthy will. I think this is also the whole divide on things like ozempic - some people view it as enabling people to have unhealthy will power. Other people view it as the only way someone can have healthy weight. I don't think either party is wrong, I think they are just talking past eachother.

Spivak 2y ago

Oh hey, I'm the wife in this story. Having a fixed $/month budget for "things you buy at a grocery store" was doomed from the beginning. All the stuff in your house/pantry are on all kinds of weird replacement cycles that vary with usage and changes in habits. A monthly cadence also makes you sub-optimally plan around price movements. An attainable goal is to reduce the average amount of monthly grocery spend and you do it by deciding, in advance, things you're no longer going to stock in the house, items you'll replace for cheaper options, or items you'll stock from wholesale clubs. It's hard to bring the budget for gas down without people driving less. Your wife being the one tasked with filling up the tank is the messenger. It could be an emotional reaction as you describe but I would at least entertain the idea that her "bending the rules" is her way of trying to make an impossible ask doable. Whether she is consciously thinking about it or not, I bet the stuff that "doesn't count" aren't replaced every month and have spikey cost patterns.

everdrive 2y ago
To your credit, our approach never worked :) I totally agree that you'd need to find a reasonable average weekly cost because costs and timing would vary. In my mind, this means you could find a reasonable average weekly cost that you often go under, and seldom go over. But, it just never happened for us. In principle we could have just kept raising the price ceiling, but eventually that becomes meaningless in the context of a budget. To me, at least, it felt just like calories; what could have been a pretty easy math problem was defeated by human psychology.
3vidence 2y ago
I think this also summarizes the issues a lot for people on HN face. Oversimplification and over confidence in estimation. Engineers tend to do this a lot.

landtuna 2y ago

I never understood why calories in == calories out was relevant when we can't know how many unprocessed calories are remaining undigested. Here's what the bots had to say: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/weight-loss-gurus-often-say-ca-oZZg9RgkQXS3Gm4tmB9TcQ https://www.perplexity.ai/search/weight-loss-gurus-often-say... (FYI - I stay thin by limiting calories, so I don't disagree that fewer calories causes weight loss)

ttoinou 2y ago
This theory is not scientific (food is not energy, the body is not a machine, measurements are not precise etc.) so there is nothing rationale you can say that will convince people who believe in it to switch to something else
nemomarx 2y ago
cico is true, but you can't measure calories in accurately and you can't be sure of calories out accurately. isn't that fun? (in practice as you know, you just kinda do it on feel and end up restricting calories enough to lose weight. but my own intuition is that I had to aim for 100 or 200 less than my estimated BMR so the math is very fuzzy isn't it?)

keybored 2y ago

> This feels a LOT like weight loss. Calories in --> calories out is conceptually very simple, but in practice more people struggle with it than not. It certainly cannot be the case that they struggle with the concept; they struggle with actually putting it into action. Lying to themselves, twisting themselves into philosophical knots, and probably most often, conceding to their cravings. Food acquisition is one of out more basic drives, so it should probably be no surprise that people struggle to intellectualize it. Imagine a piano teacher. Their mantra is practice in --------> skill out. Profound. Every time their students come to them and complain about not being motivated, practice being too dull, experiencing back pain or repetitive stress syndromes, wanting to change up the practice, they just say: practice in equals skill out. What is so hard to understand? That’s what the "calories in/out" people are like. And this is the only area where this is an accepted argument. Where it is even treated as a valid argument at all. Everyone knows that you have to put in time on an instrument in order to get better. Everyone. No one denies it. Similarily I don’t think the overlap of weight loss pursuers and deniers of energy conservation as it moves through food groups (plants to cows to humans) is terribly large. If you truly want to rationally assist people who want to learn the piano or lose weight you do what works. You don’t repeat a truism. Cutting out sugar? Meat? Intermmitteng fasting? Counting calories? Anything that works. You don’t sheepishly point out that they failed to practice their ten hours last week without even asking why didn’t follow through. The in/out people seem to have a hard time intellectualizing this simple concept.

wrfrmers 2y ago

Calories in -> calories out is flawed (or, rather, not useful) because metabolism is a feedback loop, not a one-way serial process. The types of foods you eat, how they're prepared, and when you eat them have complex influence for how hungry you feel and how much energy you have to exercise or resist impulses, as well as ramifications for the state of your physiology, per nutrient intake. CICO helps explain weight management issues retrospectively, but it's inadequate with regard to planning, and for maintaining quality of life while working towards a weight management goal.

Pigalowda 2y ago
What happens if I ingest 0 calories for 3 months?
- 3vidence 2y ago
  To parents point your metabolism will drastically change over those 3 months and the rate at which you lose weight will change. Additionally the distribution of your muscles and fat will also change.
  - wrfrmers 2y ago
    I don't know the mechanics, but my understanding is that such a water fast also permanently alters your digestion and metabolism. A (logical extreme) example I was thinking of counterig with: if you eat 500,000 calories in 24 hours on the first of the year, and nothing else for the rest of it, you'll achieve a 1,350 calorie/day average, certainly enough to lose a significant amount of weight. And you will! Because your stomach will have ruptured and you'll be dead by the 2nd. Rotting is one way to burn calories. (I mention this to illustrate how focusing solely on the numbers, to the detriment of the actual lived quality of life during the weight management process, misses the forest for the trees.)