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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

The problem is the word “just”, not the rest of the advice. “‘Just’ eat less” has been straightforward for me when my scales tell me I needed to do that, but it clearly isn’t for most people else obesity wouldn’t be one of the single biggest issues in western healthcare.

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Same with climbing everest without oxygen bottles, 'just' use less air.

Is choosing to eat less really analogous to choosing to be able to breathe without oxygen?

Climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen is possible and has been done[0], and isn’t the same thing as “breathing without oxygen”.

[0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Messner

Ok interesting, but I still wonder if that’s really analogous to choosing to eat less food?

That the person who did it has their own Wikipedia page makes me think it is probably harder.

It seems 200 people did it so far, around 4% of all climbers (at some point of time) :https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/climbing-everest-adria... probably more of the 5k could have done it if they wanted to do it (and prepare longer for it).

Also interesting! I am still unsure though how losing weight is like climbing mount everest without supplemental oxygen. Can you clarify that part?

It is about the usage of 'just'. So while in the first case people think the just is justified, the before mentioned data indicates that only a few people manage to 'just' do it. The order of percentage of ppl beeing able to do it is the same as something which seems very hard to do (the everest thing). So while objectively they are comparable it shines light on that the usage of 'just' is bad in both cases while the subjective perception is very different. Not sure if I can make it clearer.

Edit:maybe I was thinking to complicated in this reply. The analogy is: you have two different things which can be achieved through doing a specific thing, but doing this thing is hard in both cases so using the word 'just' is not appropriate which is easier to see in the example.

Yes. The odds of someone climbing without supplemental oxygen vs achieving and maintaining weight loss are comparably low, presumably because they are very difficult, and cannot “just” be chosen so simply.

Changing habits is hard, making choices is hard, doing things that feel uncomfortable is really hard. I have a lot of sympathy, for the idea and we all struggle with stuff like that.

But unfortunately this isn't a complicated subject. Weight is controlled by diet and standard healthy diets are very well known. Nearly everyone can keep their weight down. Even if people don't, it is objectively not that hard to do. A lot of people don't accept the rewards are worth the discomfort.

> doing things that feel uncomfortable is really hard

> [keeping their weight down] is objectively not that hard to do

Would you mind picking one?

They're both true. One is subjective experience, the other is objective experience.

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