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I think many people confuse simple with easy. It IS simple to reduce your weight. There are like, two things you need to do. It is, however, VERY hard to actua

I think many people confuse simple with easy. It IS simple to reduce your weight. There are like, two things you need to do. It is, however, VERY hard to actually do those things.

morkalork 1y ago
Even then, limiting calorie intake isn't all that difficult; there's a reason why intermittent fasting took off and so many people were getting results from it.
- nosignono 1y ago
  It is that difficult, otherwise everyone would do it.
- tsol 1y ago
  Not necessarily. Some people respond well too intermittent fasting but not everyone. Some people respond to keto but not everyone. And just because you respond doesn't mean it's gonna take you to where you need to be. I've always been skinny but for some reason I've gained weight recently. Even with keto, intermittent fasting, tirzeptide, and workouts twice a week I have only lost 5 lbs in months. When I was skinny and forgot to eat, I would feel a little crappy but still could function. Now I begin to feel incredibly depressed, I can't sleep nor focus. This solidified it to me that there's a circuit in your brain that controls feeding and if it's out of whack it'll punish you until you eat. Dieting takes months and no one can go that long without sleep. So it's still a practical problem, its just hard to see if your system is well calibrated.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > Even with keto, intermittent fasting, tirzeptide, and workouts twice a week I have only lost 5 lbs in months. If you're combining a ketogenic diet AND intermittent fasting AND a GLP-1 inhibitor AND exercise and you're still losing less weight than observed in the Ozempic studies, it's likely that there's more to this story. Ketogenic dieting does not automatically translate to weight loss. Keto simply makes it easier to reduce caloric intake. It's actually very easy to gain weight on a keto diet due to the high caloric density of consuming that much fat. > Now I begin to feel incredibly depressed, I can't sleep nor focus. Honestly if you're having these dramatic negative effects from minor caloric restriction with GLP-1 inhibitors, something else is going on.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- const_cast 1y ago
  Ive heard this same sentence, verbatim, repeated throughout the course of decades for particular fad diets. Decades.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    The irony is that all that "it's so easy" "it's just calories in, calories out" "if you eat according to this plan and make sure to get 8 hours of sleep a day, you won't even feel the cravings" Is stuff that fat people say. They totally buy into it and buy all of the products to help them convince themselves this is true. Then they get disillusioned when it doesn't work, have a crisis of faith, then go to the next fad to get over the self-hatred caused by their failure at sticking to something so easy. Intermittent fasting is great. It got me from 225 to 165, kept it off for the past few years with no effort (my entire metabolism recalibrated to 165-175, I guess.) I also know people who cry actual tears when they're very late for a meal, or panic. Those people need therapy and/or maybe an injection to artificially lower their appetites to the level where I also artificially lowered my own appetite. Intermittent fasting is no more natural than injections. Dieting is modernity.
    - kulahan 1y ago
      I’m certain IF more closely resembles how humans ate for millions of years, not knowing when our next meal would come before becoming an agrarian society, and we haven’t had much time to evolve since then. So, yeah, dieting is modern, but so is an abundance of food. Both are equally unnatural.
      - KPGv2 1y ago
        This is literally the argument keto, carnivore, and caveman diet people make. "I feel like this is how we ate 10,000 years ago, so it must be natural and therefore good!" We also didn't get vaccines for most of history. That doesn't mean remaining unvaccinated is good. For the record, keto works for me (including bloodwork to prove it) but is unsustainable. My mind is never sufficient compared to when I'm eating normally. It's observable in my work and parenting. Although, last time I was on keto, my cholesterol was through the roof. I went off keto and three months later numbers were back to normal. And I wasn't consuming a shitton of meat and butter or anything. I was pretty close to exactly the right numbers for optimal health. Just...something made the numbers terrible and I've no idea why. Did a re-test to confirm. Same awful cholesterol. On IF I actually got fatter. Numbers worse. Less healthy. Couldn't exercise as vigorously. For me, calorie counting works. It's also not sustainable, because with kids you get in a rush and if you have a normal social life you eat at places you can't calorie count. To stay healthy I just try as hard as I can and exercise (distance running, weightlifting, tennis when I can, which is pretty rare with three young children).
- blitzar 1y ago
  Limiting calorie intake is easy. Consuming near unlimited calories is even easier and a lot more fun.
  - astrange 1y ago
    I will tell you the secret: resistant fiber supplements. There's other zero-calorie foods too, but they tend to cause intestinal discomfort rather than improve it.
    - kulahan 1y ago
      Not that I think it's necessarily appropriate to discuss here, but I've also been of the opinion that fiber is pretty dang necessary for health. It limits calorie uptake, it massively helps shield against sugar uptake, it helps us poop better, etc. Started having sweetened oatmeal for a midnight snack and already I feel better all over.
leidenfrost 1y ago
But it's not. What you're referring to, is the basic concept of thermodynamic calorie in/calorie out. Yes, you can "just" reduce food and lose weight if you hit deficit numbers. But if you don't do it correctly, you'll feel like trash, you'll suffer bad cravings, and put yourself in a stressful mental situation for days, possibly putting your job at risk. You have to: - Eat less than what you're already eating - But enough to nourish yourself so you keep being in good shape for your work and hobbies - Manage hunger - Make the change sustainable so you can keep doing it for the rest of your life. It's specially hard when your work is entirely sedentary, you live alone and, ironically, when you have a salary that let's you order food every day. A lot of people don't have it hard. Maybe because they have someone cooking for them at home, because they meal prep the entire week, or because their work is so physically intensive they can just wing it and burn everything with what they need to do for a living anyway.
- kulahan 1y ago
  Right, so exactly like I said, it's very simple. If you want to lose weight, reduce calories. If you add extra modifiers like "I want to feel great while doing it" and "I want to lose weight while sedentary" and "I want to continue eating whatever stupid thing I want" and "I need to be able to scroll tiktok for at least 3 hours, leaving no time for cooking", it gets much more complicated. Side note: LOL at "but if you're craving food you might get fired!!1!" - this is professional victimhood at its finest.
- throwawaylaptop 1y ago
  Inaccurate in my opinion. Let's say you eat 2500 calories a day usually. But you want to lose weight so you reduce it to 1800. Except your calories are from pop tarts. If you ate 100 calories of pop tarts every hour you're awake for total of 1800 calories... At the end of the month you'd be fatter. If you ate 1800 calories of pop tarts once a day in 1 hour, you might maintain weight or loose a little. Maybe. If you had 3600 calories of pop tarts in a few hour window, and then didn't eat again for 48 hours, you'd lose weight in a month. Insulin control is 99% of losing weight. Yes thermodynamic blah blah, but unless you pay attention to hormone control that controls metabolism in general, it's not going to work without insane willpower to keep your 'calories out' higher than your body wants. If you repeated the 3600 calories every 48 hours with beef instead, you'd lose weight like never before.

I think many people confuse simple with easy. It IS simple to reduce your weight. There are like, two things you need to do. It is, however, VERY hard to actually do those things.

morkalork 1y ago

Even then, limiting calorie intake isn't all that difficult; there's a reason why intermittent fasting took off and so many people were getting results from it.

nosignono 1y ago
It is that difficult, otherwise everyone would do it.
tsol 1y ago
Not necessarily. Some people respond well too intermittent fasting but not everyone. Some people respond to keto but not everyone. And just because you respond doesn't mean it's gonna take you to where you need to be. I've always been skinny but for some reason I've gained weight recently. Even with keto, intermittent fasting, tirzeptide, and workouts twice a week I have only lost 5 lbs in months. When I was skinny and forgot to eat, I would feel a little crappy but still could function. Now I begin to feel incredibly depressed, I can't sleep nor focus. This solidified it to me that there's a circuit in your brain that controls feeding and if it's out of whack it'll punish you until you eat. Dieting takes months and no one can go that long without sleep. So it's still a practical problem, its just hard to see if your system is well calibrated.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > Even with keto, intermittent fasting, tirzeptide, and workouts twice a week I have only lost 5 lbs in months. If you're combining a ketogenic diet AND intermittent fasting AND a GLP-1 inhibitor AND exercise and you're still losing less weight than observed in the Ozempic studies, it's likely that there's more to this story. Ketogenic dieting does not automatically translate to weight loss. Keto simply makes it easier to reduce caloric intake. It's actually very easy to gain weight on a keto diet due to the high caloric density of consuming that much fat. > Now I begin to feel incredibly depressed, I can't sleep nor focus. Honestly if you're having these dramatic negative effects from minor caloric restriction with GLP-1 inhibitors, something else is going on.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
const_cast 1y ago
Ive heard this same sentence, verbatim, repeated throughout the course of decades for particular fad diets. Decades.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  The irony is that all that "it's so easy" "it's just calories in, calories out" "if you eat according to this plan and make sure to get 8 hours of sleep a day, you won't even feel the cravings" Is stuff that fat people say. They totally buy into it and buy all of the products to help them convince themselves this is true. Then they get disillusioned when it doesn't work, have a crisis of faith, then go to the next fad to get over the self-hatred caused by their failure at sticking to something so easy. Intermittent fasting is great. It got me from 225 to 165, kept it off for the past few years with no effort (my entire metabolism recalibrated to 165-175, I guess.) I also know people who cry actual tears when they're very late for a meal, or panic. Those people need therapy and/or maybe an injection to artificially lower their appetites to the level where I also artificially lowered my own appetite. Intermittent fasting is no more natural than injections. Dieting is modernity.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    I’m certain IF more closely resembles how humans ate for millions of years, not knowing when our next meal would come before becoming an agrarian society, and we haven’t had much time to evolve since then. So, yeah, dieting is modern, but so is an abundance of food. Both are equally unnatural.
    - KPGv2 1y ago
      This is literally the argument keto, carnivore, and caveman diet people make. "I feel like this is how we ate 10,000 years ago, so it must be natural and therefore good!" We also didn't get vaccines for most of history. That doesn't mean remaining unvaccinated is good. For the record, keto works for me (including bloodwork to prove it) but is unsustainable. My mind is never sufficient compared to when I'm eating normally. It's observable in my work and parenting. Although, last time I was on keto, my cholesterol was through the roof. I went off keto and three months later numbers were back to normal. And I wasn't consuming a shitton of meat and butter or anything. I was pretty close to exactly the right numbers for optimal health. Just...something made the numbers terrible and I've no idea why. Did a re-test to confirm. Same awful cholesterol. On IF I actually got fatter. Numbers worse. Less healthy. Couldn't exercise as vigorously. For me, calorie counting works. It's also not sustainable, because with kids you get in a rush and if you have a normal social life you eat at places you can't calorie count. To stay healthy I just try as hard as I can and exercise (distance running, weightlifting, tennis when I can, which is pretty rare with three young children).
blitzar 1y ago
Limiting calorie intake is easy. Consuming near unlimited calories is even easier and a lot more fun.
- astrange 1y ago
  I will tell you the secret: resistant fiber supplements. There's other zero-calorie foods too, but they tend to cause intestinal discomfort rather than improve it.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    Not that I think it's necessarily appropriate to discuss here, but I've also been of the opinion that fiber is pretty dang necessary for health. It limits calorie uptake, it massively helps shield against sugar uptake, it helps us poop better, etc. Started having sweetened oatmeal for a midnight snack and already I feel better all over.

leidenfrost 1y ago

But it's not. What you're referring to, is the basic concept of thermodynamic calorie in/calorie out. Yes, you can "just" reduce food and lose weight if you hit deficit numbers. But if you don't do it correctly, you'll feel like trash, you'll suffer bad cravings, and put yourself in a stressful mental situation for days, possibly putting your job at risk. You have to: - Eat less than what you're already eating - But enough to nourish yourself so you keep being in good shape for your work and hobbies - Manage hunger - Make the change sustainable so you can keep doing it for the rest of your life. It's specially hard when your work is entirely sedentary, you live alone and, ironically, when you have a salary that let's you order food every day. A lot of people don't have it hard. Maybe because they have someone cooking for them at home, because they meal prep the entire week, or because their work is so physically intensive they can just wing it and burn everything with what they need to do for a living anyway.

kulahan 1y ago
Right, so exactly like I said, it's very simple. If you want to lose weight, reduce calories. If you add extra modifiers like "I want to feel great while doing it" and "I want to lose weight while sedentary" and "I want to continue eating whatever stupid thing I want" and "I need to be able to scroll tiktok for at least 3 hours, leaving no time for cooking", it gets much more complicated. Side note: LOL at "but if you're craving food you might get fired!!1!" - this is professional victimhood at its finest.
throwawaylaptop 1y ago
Inaccurate in my opinion. Let's say you eat 2500 calories a day usually. But you want to lose weight so you reduce it to 1800. Except your calories are from pop tarts. If you ate 100 calories of pop tarts every hour you're awake for total of 1800 calories... At the end of the month you'd be fatter. If you ate 1800 calories of pop tarts once a day in 1 hour, you might maintain weight or loose a little. Maybe. If you had 3600 calories of pop tarts in a few hour window, and then didn't eat again for 48 hours, you'd lose weight in a month. Insulin control is 99% of losing weight. Yes thermodynamic blah blah, but unless you pay attention to hormone control that controls metabolism in general, it's not going to work without insane willpower to keep your 'calories out' higher than your body wants. If you repeated the 3600 calories every 48 hours with beef instead, you'd lose weight like never before.