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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

If, in an attempt to lose weight, I drink a can of diet coke instead of regular coke when I eat my daily Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese and Large Fries, some would say either I'm not really trying to lose weight, or I've grievously misunderstood the whole enterprise.

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Keeping everything else the same someone who drinks a 24oz Diet Coke vs regular every day ends up ~25 lbs lighter. That’s less obvious if their baseline is 300lbs, but it’s still meaningful 8% of their body weight and a great first step.

Keeping everything else the same is hard with diets, but just cutting soda does seem to have a real impact.

Your point would work better if you said "eat healthily" rather than "lose weight". Because just dropping sugared soda from an already-unhealthy diet is a fantastic weight loss method. :D

Yep. Bad analogy.

A better analogy for the straw is skipping one fry in each meal. Technically that's an improvement, but the amount is negligible and if you act like it made a difference you're more likely to skip opportunities to actually force meaningful change.

Some others would say they understand the challenge of losing weight and the diet coke habit is a great first step! Do you know what you'd like to tackle as the next one?

I lost 10lbs just switching to diet soda. It's definitely not a small change if you're drinking soda often like I was. I eventually moved off of soda entirely.

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