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Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

> Pro-breakfast proponents say that eating breakfast results in eating less throughout the day, but I can't say this has been true at all for myself.

Another sample size of 1, but I had the same experience. Eating or not eating breakfast has no apparent impact on my hunger at lunchtime. (Not eating dinner the night before, however, does, so I'm hardly immune to hunger. I wish)

> The only negative effect I'm having is that my sex drive has plummeted to near-zero

This symptom I do not share, however.

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> This symptom I do not share, however.

Yeah, it's funny because I eat plenty of eggs and fat, which have constituents used by the body to produce hormones like testosterone. If anything, I'd expect the opposite effect but I haven't read any literature on the effects it can have on libido, so I'm not sure what's typical.

Are you a skinny person? I've read people under a certain body% fat can have lower sex drive as the body is signaling to them that they do not have enough nutrients to spare/procreate.

Could be made up but sounds like a plausible theory to me.

People describe me as "skinny" or "slender", but I've got a fair amount of muscle and still some fat left over from when I was overweight.(I dropped over 60 lbs from 2013 to 2015 and have stayed at around 160 lbs) But I don't have calipers and haven't measured my body fat percentage, so I guess that'd be a good thing to figure out.

> I'm hardly immune to hunger. I wish

Why would you wish such a thing? Being hungry and then eating is one of the nicest things in life.

> Why would you wish such a thing? Being hungry and then eating is one of the nicest things in life.

"hunger is the best sauce" - yes, I agree. Several years ago, I even made a similar comment to yours when I discovered a coworker disliked eating. But that was 50 pounds ago and I was overweight then.

Now I find that a lot of pleasures of the world are less pleasurable because I'm fat. Eating less (and appropriately, but still less) is the key component to not being fat, but that's hard because I'm hungry. I wish to continue to eat, and to enjoy eating, but I'll happily give up that extra burst of enjoyment while eating for the benefits I'd get in the rest of my life - both from the better health and the reduced unhappiness of wanting to eat.

Thus my comment.

Thanks for the response! Still, I wonder what we as society get so wrong. People used to eat whatever they wanted (and was available) whenever they wanted and not be fat. I recently watched the original woodstock 69 footage. There are zero fat people there. For all I know it may have nothing to do with eating.

There's a big difference between "eating when you want" and having an active lifestyle that restricts eating naturally, versus binging TV on the couch with junk food 10 feed away.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3102055/

Conclusion

Over the last 50 years in the U.S. we estimate that daily occupation-related energy expenditure has decreased by more than 100 calories, and this reduction in energy expenditure accounts for a significant portion of the increase in mean U.S. body weights for women and men

That's 3000 calories per month, or almost 10 lbs of fat per year.

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