Hacker News Reader

>For many obese people telling them to just do more sport and >eat proper is like telling a depressed person to just stand >up in the morning and go out or a person with social anxiety >to just leave the house. I.e. impolite, discriminatory, mean >and far of reality.

They need to cut calories and therefore must first be able to control their intake (counting calories). Then they can cut 400cals per day, If that does not work, cut 600-800cals. 200cal steps. This always works.

Yeah no. Don't do that. Your body adapts to low caloric intake and make weight loss wayyy harder than it needs to be.

Go on a low carb / ketogenic diet instead. You get to eat lots of protein and fat. You will automatically feel less hungry but also, once ketosis sets in you will have a surplus of power that you can uses for physical activity. Added bonus, your body will react to insulin again.

No it doesnt. I lost weight by not eating. It worked just fine.

Just because there are cases where it does work didn't mean it works for everyone, there are more then a few well know well supervised cases which show that it don't work on all cases. Especially not long term.

It guarantees works for everyone. I lost all my excess weight in just 2 months, first time ever in my life going on a diet. And as a physicist I was convinced from the start that a caloric deficit MUST work. It did.

Yes, what I can say it will be harder for some persons than others. The hormonal environment in the body can not be disregarded and can be either disrupted or genetically different. STILL, restricting your eating habit (caloric deficit), will.always.work.

Doesn't this violate calories in/calories out, or is that model only theoretical?

> Go on a low carb / ketogenic diet instead

Agree, it's the easiest way to lose weight. Cut out processed food, added sugars and rice/potato/bread, and the weight will drop off very easily. No need to count calories because it'll be very hard to eat too much as long as we cut out the above.

> Doesn't this violate calories in/calories out, or is that model only theoretical?

As often understood, the latter. Two factors (there are others): metabolism of fat, sugar, and protein are hormonally (such as insulin) and differentially dependent, as well as the storage of excess calories.

This adopting metabolic rate is way overblown. Yes it does happen, but somewhat slightly. For someone just aiming to lose weight, you don't have to think about this at all. Just be in caloric deficit, and adjust slightly if needed (usually not).

On a healthy person, reducing calories will work fine.

For a person whose body is pumping full of cortisol, thus pumping also with raised glucose and insulin levels, gradually cutting calories can results in even higher stress response, lethargy, disrupted sleep patterns, reduce satiety triggers, changed apatite towards fat and sugar, and a bunch of other problems that all contribute to the opposite desired effect of loosing weight. A body in panic mode will do about everything except loosing weight unless it is actually medically starving.

No it doesn't. Please do proper research on this, biased thinking like that is harmful for the society.

Edit: I also realized that there are major environmental differences, like where I grow up most people which where obese did try to eat less and do sport and as such the ones which are still obese are often not so because they don't eat proper and don't do sport but because they have other health issues.

It ALWAYS work for a person not having severe diabetes. In case of diabetes (at least type 2) it might actually help, but care is needed.

> For many obese people telling them to just do more sport and eat proper is like telling a depressed person to just stand up in the morning and go out or a person with social anxiety to just leave the house. I.e. impolite, discriminatory, mean and far of reality.

... but it's the truth. I guess that would qualify as "hate-facts". Sometime, you need a good kick in the butt to get your shit together, it just happen the US is now a country of mentality inept people.

It's not the truth, far from it please look into the scientific research around this topic.

This is in line with my own observations too.

I think non obese people really look down on people who are obese and have absolutely no idea what we put ourselves through to lose weight.

It's honestly disgusting and extremely damaging to mental health. You can see examples of this in the comment section here.

As someone who has lost 40 lbs and continues to lose weight, I get it, but at the end of the day you're the one who's going to get heart disease early, get diabetes, die young, etc, not the ones who aren't obese.

Stop worrying so much about what other people think and do what you think is best to take care of yourself. Get help if you need it - there are a lot of real clinical options these days. These are internet commenters who don't know you and won't ever know you, and won't care when you die. That's just life. Don't sweat it.

No. As a person who was extremely obese, I realize that this attitude was exactly what was needed to get me to lose weight. I am now at a reasonably healthy weight and realize that every excuse I ever made as an obese person was incredibly stupid and lazy.

I hope you learn that not everyone thinks the way you do. Shaming (on average) doesn’t help people lose weight, it actually adds to their stressors which can lead to weight gain [1].

So if you continue to do it, fine, but be aware you’re being an ass, and not a helpful one.

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4236245/

Thanks. I gave up trying to get this through to people here.

What's even more sad is seeing so many of these comments directed by people who proudly announce where they work and what they do. Not even an ounce of shame to not do this from their identity attached accounts.

I was fairly overweight (BMI bordering on obese) and encourage frank and constant discourse around the health consequences of obesity, and disagree with the normalization of obesity in e.g. fashion magazines and advertisements. Seeing such discourse led me to finally take some action.

We shouldn't be intentionally mean (and I agree there's too much of that), but they're literally killing themselves with their lifestyle. It's something that they should be strongly dissuaded from by their peers and by society, for their own sake and society's sake. It must be the leading health crisis in rich countries right now, now that smoking is unpopular.

It's not 100% the obese person's fault: food companies have hacked their dopamine systems with added sugar/salt/MSG/etc (similar to social media companies hacking attention mechanisms), obesity is largely genetic (in terms of the tendency to overeat and ability to satiate hunger), obesity is likely triggered by some underlying mental health issue (e.g. depression), and evolution programmed us to eat us much as we can get our hands on. It's hard to fight biology. But it's not accurate that obesity is just a metabolism issue. Obese people take in too many calories, usually from added sugars and carbohydrates. They may take in 2400 calories a day when their BMR is 1600, and the chronic impact is obesity.

I think part of the problem of this discussion are differences in the country we live in because of how people are treated in the given area.

I.e. in the environment I grew up obesity was not very common and general seen as unhealthy and not good looking. In turn many of the people which are still obese are people where just eating less and doing more sport doesn't really work and in turn telling them to just do so is problematic.

But on the other side going just to a different part of Germany some degree of obesity caused by drinking to much beer, unhealthy food and maybe to little sport is quite common in the idk. 50+ generation.

> where just eating less and doing more sport doesn't really work

I can understand it not working because it's hard to eat less when attempting to lose weight (something I've struggled with for a long time), but I know if I eat less calories, then I reliably lose weight. I can drop 2lb a week very easily by maintaining a deficit, but I regularly fail in my long-term objective and bounce back when I get stressed and overeat back over 2000 calories/day. So at least for me (most/all people?), it's not that eating less doesn't work, it's the inability to do that (genes/depression/stress/environment/whatever) which is the root cause.