and
> I never understood how simple it was before starting this.
Sounds so trivial, but sadly true for a lot of things in life. You read and hear something multiple times, but you have to make the experience yourself to get your eyes opened.
Also, eating.. pickiness too. I don't mind leftovers, hell I don't even mind eating the same thing for a week, two, etc. She hates leftovers and always wants freshly cooked. Also rotating food types, as it can't be too similar to what she ate recently.
All combined it means that finding hearty meals (and now keto for us) are more effort for her than for someone like me. To no surprise, I have no weight to lose (I need to workout to even maintain weight), but it really frustrates her at how different our bodies are.
She considers her food habits to be an "addiction" in large part due to how different her and my reactions are to food. Her struggles are far more than mine on this front.
I did that for 2 years, and afterwards I developed an aversion to eating, I just got so sick of having to gorge myself at every meal, and never being able to go more than a few hours without thinking about food.
I'm the type of person Soylent advertises to. I even made my own for a ~year. Keto (mostly low carb for me, not keto) has been a massive boon though. Fats just leave me so much more sated and stable. I highly recommend it if you don't like to eat or want to eat more dense meals.
For me, it is that simple. My point was that for my wife, there are a ton of other considerations she deals with. Sure, they're mainly in her head (though possibly other factors such as gut biome play a role), but large she has more details to factor in when she thinks about "will I be able to do this?". I on the other hand don't. For me, it's exactly as the author described, simple.
Yes, simple does not mean easy, but saying quitting smoking is simple to a smoker is not an honest assessment of their situation.
Most things in life are simple if you ignore reality and speak of life from a bubble.
Somebodies reaction to a hard thing may be complex, but that is more about them than the thing. Although as you note, there is a risk of oversimplifying (e.g. your example of possible implications of gut biome, but that doesn't really shift the fundamentals).
The reason I think this distinction is a good one to make is the problem with the converse. If something being hard implies it is complex, it will lead often to people generating extraneous complexity around it which makes it actually more difficult for the people involved, and can lead to very convoluted thinking and errors in that thinking. You need only look at the massive industries built around things like weight loss and quitting smoking to see examples of this (not that everything in those industries is nonsense, but they do contain a lot of profitable nonsense).
This had nothing to do with bubbles. The risk is that instead of supporting people in doing a hard thing, we raise false hope of making it easy.
That's why I felt my situation and my wife's differed. Mine was simple because there wasn't an underlying pile of complexity. Her underlying "addiction" and etc are noteworthy items in her list of things she needs to do. It's simple if you ignore the problems, but if she wants to actually implement that simple instruction she needs to figure out the little details that affect her.
So yes, it is simple if we're not talking about her situation with context and reality. Mine is simple in all contexts, in my opinion.
Smoking is a good example imo on where our opinions differ. Smoking is super far simple in my mind, because many people can't just stop smoking (or rather, lack the willpower). So they need additional data, the simple instruction was.. imo, not so simple.
You are basically promoting the idea that I am rejecting, that because people find things difficult and have a lot of complicated reactions to it, that means the underlying problem is itself must be complex. I don't believe that is either true or useful, and argue that it can often make the problems themselves worse by muddying the water.
Some problems are complicated but relatively easy. In this case, if you just find "the right trick" you can solve it without much difficultly. We do people a disservice when we pretend that simple-but-hard problems are actually complicated-but-easy. This is something that is often done, for commercial gain, in industries like weight loss and smoking cessation. At core, I am arguing that this is a bad thing.
At any rate, we've probably reached diminishing returns here.
It's often not that trivial, nor true. There's a ton of litterature on the subject, here is an articla I like:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/28/why-t...
A good quote:
> The much bigger mistake Wishnofsky made was misunderstanding how our bodies react to weight loss. As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. "It literally starts happening on the first day," said Hall. "And it continues to mount as you lose weight."
> The reason Wishnofsky, and so many others since, have botched this biological fact is that it's fairly counterintuitive
Basically our bodies are not simple in any way, in particular when it comes to how it handles energy, which is core to our survival. There is a good amount of survivor bias in all the "that's how I lost weight" tales floating around.
This is also discussed in the Hacker's Diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker's_Diet / https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/, free ebook and accompanying software). There seems to be a plateau around your "normal" lifestyle on which the body adjusts to small differences in calories in and out. You have to push the difference beyond a certain threshold to actually make a difference:
"If you eat a little too much, the body cranks up the burn rate a little: you feel warmer and more inclined to run up a flight of stairs rather than walk. If you eat a tad less than ideal, you may feel chilly and inclined to curl up with a book under the blankets and get a little extra sleep. [...] To achieve weight loss, you have to reduce what goes in below your capacity to adjust by banking the metabolic fires, forcing your body to tap its reserves[.]"
All of the people I know who did reasonable carb counting, stuck to a 8 to 16 hours feeding/fasting period and picked up physical activity (n ~= 5) lost weight in the 5-10kg area.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that there are other simple life rules that feel like an epiphany while sounding trivial, e.g. "How I got rid of my debt by spending less than I earn."
Only part I agree with that article, 3500 calories per pound wasn’t accurate for me. 3800 was about right, for me. But it’s not like 3500 is far off. I used it as a base rate until a month of data told me otherwise.
Here’s the reason why people think the simple rule of physics doesn’t work on their body, they are lying to themselves.
Some people think they burn 6000 calories like Michael Phelps because they bobbed in a pool for half an hour. Walked 20 min outside? I “hiked uphill” for 30 min then, I burned 300 calories. A serving of potato chips is 150 calories for 12 chips? Half a family bag is only 300 calories then! My body won’t notice a few cookies.
This is the bullshit people tell themselves regularly. I’ve heard it from MYSELF and from other obese folks who bitch about their problems.
Accurately count every single calorie you take in with a spreadsheet and you’ll see just how much of a fatass you are. That’s what I did for my once fat booty. Even count that cookie and candy bar. No excuses. Count every exercise accurately as well.
Human bodies are amazingly efficient. Scary efficient when you start to think that a slice of bread can walk your sack of meat about a mile. But physics and math will ALWAYS prevail. Energy is never created, only transfered. Fat is stored energy. Real basic high school stuff here people. That bow flex can’t bend the laws of physics.
And quit acting like survivorship bias is an excuse for laziness. So tired of everyone saying survivorship bias so they can complain about their problems these days. Sure, not everyone will succeed through hard work. But I also admit, I won’t put in the same effort as The Rock. That man earns his glorious cheat days. Earned, not whined. Hell, do you see any relatively decent athlete eating ice cream all day “oh I don’t work at anything, I just take this secret pill that all failures don’t take”.
Seriously, enough already. Do the work and quit with the excuses. Once I quit giving myself reasons why “oh I’m fat because...”, I started losing weight. I stopped eating fast food. Dropped simple carbs. Haven’t had soda since I started. What’s fun, I literally have to eat more steak to make calories and protein everyday. Fantastic perk to all of this. Props to OP for 2.7 average per week. Mine is 1.5 a week. But I’ve also been weight lifting so I’m assuming the muscle mass is slightly offsetting that.
Moral of the story, your comment is hurting people that are on the edge of making a positive change in their life. Stop hurting people for your own crocodile tears.
The article I picked was about the body compensating calory loss, but there is also other mechanism like increasing stress that boost up appetite in some people.
For a lot of people decreasing the amount of calories will be a psychological hell and can’t be done without dramatic changes to compensate. Telling them “reduce your calory intake, it’s not magical” will just be cruel and unhelpful, when they need structural rethinking of basicaly their life.
Some other will lose mostly water non-fat stuff and think their diet is working and not understand the ups and downs in their weight, and it’s not simple to manage if you don’t follow your muscle ratio.
Other people need to realize they actually don’t suffer much by reducing food intake, but never tried to because of social stigma or all the “influencers” shouting that diet is hard.
I’m not kin of the “Just do it” mantra thrown around to large swaths of people. As you point out some people might be on the edge of something, I just think they’ll eventually find what they need to do, while the rest of the people hearing the same message also have a chance of getting deeper in their hole by believing simplistic cheerleading.
My message would be “if you care about your health, talk to your doctor to know the actual stakes and see by yourself what you’re comfortable with”
We've finally, as a general society, grown out of telling people with clinical depression to just cheer up.
Yet we tell obese people to "just eat less". I think most obese people realise that if they want to lose weight they need to eat less.
You know, for morbidly obese people there is the possibility of stomach stapling. This physically prohibits over eating and lowers how much hunger you feel. The intervention is covered by the public health insurance in my country. And it comes with psychological supervision.
The background is that to a lot of obese people, eating is a coping mechanism and it turns out they get depressed when they no longer can eat as much as they used to.
I've know people personally who had the surgery and are still obese.
>There’s a lot of “science” that say low insulin levels in the fasted state lead to more fat burning.
That "science" he smirks at is the research primarily of Dr. Jason Fung, who specializes in diabetes and obesity. He wrote a book called the obesity code that advocates for intermittent fasting. I think I'll take the word of a man who has spent hours researching and analyzing over the snarky comments of some software engineer.
Some more examples: > If you’re in a caloric deficit this will happen anyways.
That's not true. I could eat a reduced caloric deficit of bread every day and still not burn fat. The basis of intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet is to force your body to break fat for energy as opposed to carbs. They take different approaches, but the end result is the same - to lower the amount of insulin. Keto is bit more restrictive in food because so much of the carbs in out food is sugar.
So, why did achieve results? Easy:
> I naturally started eating healthy foods because I could eat more of them. If you eat a chocolate bar, you will still be hungry. For the same amount of calories, you could eat a few bowls of vegetables and be full. That said, the best part about this overall approach is that you can still eat whatever you want – just count the calories.
There's a wide difference between how your body reacts to 100 calories of chocolate bars (sugar) and 100 calories of broccoli (fiber).
This is more junk science and using anecdotal data as opposed to research and science. If you want to lose weight, what you eat is just as important as how much you eat. End of story; caloric restriction alone isn't enough. However, this article is also incredibly short sighted. Losing weight is very much like getting married. People focus on the event and not the afterwards. You can't modify your diet, hit your target weight, and then stop. You need to keep going; fighting obesity is life long battle. I believe the majority of people who lose weight will regain that weight within 7 years. There's horror stories from the biggest loser.
My story, by the way, is that when I got married, I was 280 lbs. One night, I remember coming home from my in-laws house and deciding I was tired of being fat. I changed my diet. I cut out chips and soda at lunch and put in carrots and water. I stopped eating white bread and pasta in favor of whole grain foods. I cut the number of nights I had dessert to 1 to 2 a week. I picked up regular exercise. I tracked and measured my food. It worked. At my lowest, I was ~170 lbs. It's gone back up to 203 right now, but that's because I'm currently focusing on strength training. I will say that eating less is not enough. You have to pick the right food. As a friend of mine once wisely said, you simply cannot outwork a crappy diet.
So the same calorie diet and the same amount burned can behave differently at storing fat because of a small pill. This for me flies in the face of calories in/calories out. A pill, or insulin can really screw that up.
I've started trying intermittent fasting and low carb/high fat so far I'm amazed at how much energy I have. Still early days and I have a few old habits to kick. But it's definitely going in the right direction.
1) Low carb 2) Caloric restriction (CICO)
On both I lost weight. On CICO I still ate "less healthy" foods (processed, breads, fast food, desserts) quite often but kept within a certain calorie range. Neither weight loss involved exercise. I'm convinced #1 was just a fancy way to acheive #2. Were there separate benefits to #2? Yes (less cravings) but not enough to convince me to go back to it. Low carb is too difficult to stick to for me personally, have tried it numerous times (no need to give me advice on how to make it work for me, I'm losing weight on CICO right now and fine with that!)
Why would both work if CICO is bunk?
However, if I'm not mistaken, you've lost weight, gained, and lost it back again, right? The so-called yo-yo effect, another harbinger of people who only do CICO. The vast majority of people who lose weight regain it back within 5 years. As someone who kept it off for a decade and only started gaining it back when I start taking my resistance training a lot more seriously, I can say that if I only did CICO, I would not have kept it off. The only way to take off weight and keep it off for long periods of time is to change what you eat, get regular exercise, and know this is something you will be doing for the rest of your life.
CICO has been the easiest to "stick with", I can fulfill my cravings without regaining, because I'm not truly cutting anything out, just having less. When I want unhealthy snacks, instead of eating a bag of doritos, a fudge round, and a swiss roll, I have just the doritos and that's it. Moderation is key. I got to the point where I was basically bingeing food and not caring, which is a bad spot to be in.
The only reason I fell off of CICO once before was absolutely a decision on my part to "screw it, gonna eat what I want and however much I want because I love food, life is short" and really had nothing to do with regular here-and-there cravings. It was a conscious choice of food over health, as bad as that is. Before I made that choice, under CICO, I lost 40 pounds and kept that 40 pounds off with no problem, super easy to maintain.
Yes, I will admit that CICO causes me occasionally to choose a healthier food, because they're much less calorie dense- but day-to-day I still have bread, pasta, fruit, and sometimes dessert. I just add in some good, less dense things along the way, and overall eat less, while still enjoying it all. Seems to work. I guess time will tell, eh? :)
The trick that gets people, I imagine, is that you really can't eat very much of it all, especially as I've gotten older. You have to be willing to eat rather small portions, and rather infrequently.
Thankfully, I like plenty of non-dense foods too and can adjust the balance without cutting any desirable foods completely
> "Everything I wrote above is what worked for me – that is not to say it will work for everyone. I am also not a doctor, I’m an engineer, so none of this is medical advice – please consult your doctor."
This is just a person who wants to show HOW they did it. You can read all the scientific papers you want, but ultimately you have to put that knowledge into practice. You'll find that people have lost weight in various ways, including what you call "unscientific" or bro-science.
We have a very fuzzy understanding of human metabolic pathways, and an incomplete knowledge of their interactions with each other. If you want to dismiss somebody's data you have to first understand and explain the data, and then add your point of view.
Its a bit like telling Usain bolt hes doing it wrong because he has technical imperfections in his form, but meanwhile hes still winning races.
That "science" he smirks at is the research
primarily of Dr. Jason Fung
Like the books you can get from Dr Rupy Aujla, Charlotte Markey PhD, Dr Arthur Agatston, Dr Clare Bailey, Dr Xand van Tulleken, Dr Michael Mosley, and Dr Aseem Malhotra?
"You can't tell people anything" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384703
Yet somehow, billions failed, fail and will fail spectacularly.