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Comment by rmays | Hacker News Reader

Just eat less. It's not hard

The "it's just" crowd entirely miss what really needs to be addressed by the targets of their pithiness: the satiation mechanism. For everyone who gets upset at the "it's simple...", "it's just..." (CICO, eat less, stay out of the kitchen, etc.) tone-deaf preachiness, remember that their satiation mechanism works very different from yours.

Figure out how to hack your satiation (it is very different for different people), and you have started to unwind the stack on how to address your intake challenges. Start your rabbit hole research with the search string "long term induced satiety" (but without the quotes), and branch off from there. That starts you off with physical and chemically-constrained satiety, but there are cultural, mental, social, financial, and many other factors at play as well that might be dominant in your particular situation so go in those directions if it makes sense to you. YMMV.

Eat less calories, or even better: less calories that you actually absorb.

You intestine cannot extract every calorie, especially those in unprocessed (fiberous) plant cells get excreted.

I find eating more helps me: eat more volume/weight, of less calorie dense foods. Diets like WFPB and raw mornings-and-or-afternoons do that for me.

I forgot where I read it but a cool rule of thumb is aim for foods with 1 calorie per gram or less and you’ll naturally lose weight.

Good luck finding many foods like that or enjoying them though.

During my raw fruity mornings and lunches I actually look for calories: which I mostly find in tropical fruits.

Also: not trying to lose weight, more trying to build some :)

I guess obesity and obesity-related disease being a major cause of death would contract that it's "not hard".

It took some serious lifestyle changes for me to become and stay in shape - and habits _are_ a hard thing to change. ;-)

Eating less is a simple concept, but not necessarily easy. The author specifically mentions struggling with binge eating.

It is incredibly easy to diet yourself to nutritional deficiency of some sorts. While still gaining weight.

A well-balanced diet will certainly make you healthier and feel better! If you are eating more energy than you're expending, you will gain weight. If you are eating less energy than you're expending, you will lose weight. This is well-researched.

I think, from my experience and from the experiences I've read of people who have lost weight and kept it off, the key is finding a sustainable diet. One that your future, goal-weight self can be trusted to follow even after you're done losing the weight. People tend to get to that point and then go back to eating like they did when they were overweight, which reverses all the hard work they did.

You do know that when you eat less, the amount hungrier you get is greater than the amount you’re eating less, right? You do know that it’s been proven again and again that willpower doesn’t work?

Telling someone to eat less to lose weight is technically correct, but in reality is useless advice. And no, it really is hard.

Maybe if you got lucky with a great metabolism it might be easy, but a lot of people don’t have that and will struggle.

It’s not about eating less and more about eating correct.

Personally (I'm not that fat) I tried eating less to get a nicer body, but whenever I do so I feel tired or dizzy when exercising. Yes, I lose some weight, but it also feels that my powers are gone. I now eat whenever I am hungry as much as I want, but exercise more. I no longer have the dizzy problems.

You should write a book.

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