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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Fat is very dense in calories, so if your goal is to reduce caloric intake, reducing the fat will go a long ways towards that goal.

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>Fat is very dense in calories, so if your goal is to reduce caloric intake, reducing the fat will go a long ways towards that goal.

This thinking empowers so much over-eating in today's diet world. There's a trope with the broken low-fat wisdom that when you buy low-fat foods, you're almost always buying high-sugar high-salt foods (have to replace flavor somehow).

Even worse, upper intestinal lipids trigger a feeling of satiation, of fullness, through the gut–brain–liver axis.

If you deprive yourself of lipids, you deprive yourself of satiation -- eating a healthy mix of fats in your meals helps you feel more full and sated and eat overall less, and feel good about eating overall less.

If you buy processed foods that are advertised as fat-free or low-fat variations of foods that would typically be expected to be other than low- or non-fat, yes. A head of cabbage doesn't have sugar added to it to make some kind of low-fat cabbage.

That is first order thinking.

If eating fat satisfies you for longer than salty carbs, the net calories will be better. If it keeps your insulin levels steadier, it will effect calorie absorption. And so on.

Humans are not bunsen burners: we are impossibly complicated chemical systems with massive reflexivity built into them.

But calories from fat are more satisfying and might very well let you eat less calories over all.

This is why I can't see anyone eating 4000 calories of fat without feeling so full they'll throw most of it back up.

I have eaten 4000 calories of fat in an afternoon, mostly in cream and butter as part of a giant poundcake trifle [0]. I didn't throw up but I really regretted it all evening. This was at a time when I was very active and eating around 7000 calories a day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifle

Supposedly, this works if you eat fat and protein with very limited carbs, if any. For instance, I would gag if I had to eat those sticks of butter by themselves, but I can easily eat a lot of slices of cake. This all is the basis of a ketogenic diet, kind of like Atkins on steroids

I'm regretting commenting now. Like a bikeshed next to a nuclear plant, anybody who has ever lost any amount of weight has an opinion on how it's done.

Reducing fat reduces caloric intake. Note the word reduce (I even emphasized it), instead of remove, or replace. Yes, fats are a healthy part of a good diet. No, you should not omit them.

Of course, don't take my word for it. RTFOP, which made the recommendation in the first place.

Reducing fat reduces caloric intake.

Looks like you're doubling down. Your statement is 100% correct. The problem is, fat calories are more satisfying than non-fat calories, so you are more likely to eat less if you eat protein + fat instead of protein + carbs + less fat. That's just the wait it works.

One should eat less fat and carbs, but in doing so one will be less satisfied and be more likely to snack or eat larger portions later, negating the effect.

The problem is that while I am a good and level-headed person, my future self is a hungry bastard.

From a metabolic point of view, that is correct. What others are trying to point out is there is a mental aspect to that, involving our appetite feedback loop. The human body is a highly interdependent system, not a set of isolated microservices.

The way I view it is to maximize the enjoyment out of food. Don't just view it as fuel to be ingested as fast as possible; savor it! Appreciate the flavor of that rice, that bacon. It may sound like becoming a food snob—which it can if one has elitist tentencies—but it's more about appreciating the components that make up the food we eat, and turning it into an art.

An implied requirement for that is to slow down and take the time to eat. There's about a 20m delay for the feedback loop of satiation to occur. So eating slowly and in courses gives our bodies the time to appreciate what is coming in and for the mechanisms to provide better feedback. I'm always amazed at how some can ingest a 1800 kcal meal in 15 minutes: no feedback can happen that fast.

(Disclaimer: yes I'm French)

> Reducing fat reduces caloric intake.

Indeed, but people who want to "lose weight" actually don't care how heavy they are, they care how they look and want "to be slimmer" which is the actual result we're trying for while colloquially using the term "lose weight" to describe that effect.

(this is of course a sweeping over-generalization where there are actually a number of other reasons, related to health, fatty liver etc...)

With a goal of "BEING SLIMMER" we're actually more interested in draining triglycerides from our fat cells so they shrink. (after that we can induce apoptosis and kill them off via freezing but that's another story).

Since the goal is to drain fat cells, we're actually better served by keeping our bodies in the state where they are "emptying the fuel tanks (stored fat)" as opposed to "burning the cheap stuff (carbohydrates)"

By reducing CARB intake we can keep the fat-cells open and draining. BUT in order to reduce carb intake, we have to replace it with a macronutrient which will induce satiety.

Dietary fat is that macronutrient.

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