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Comment by cracell | Hacker News Reader

So?

It's not complicated. If someone is overweight and consuming 3,000 calories a day and then reduces to 2,000 they might not lose weight. But then they just need to reduce further.

All humans will lose weight at 0 calories per day. You just gotta find the right calorie level.

Yes exact absorption greatly varies and is impossible to measure. But that's why you just reduce until you are losing at the desired speed. You don't need to precisely measure anything. You just need to be able to tell if overall consumption is going up or down.

Of course this is mentally very challenging so people try to find reasons for it to not work. But energy has to come from somewhere.

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> All humans will lose weight at 0 calories per day

It might be meant in jest or just as a rhetorical point, but it is really the core of your argument. Basically it’s a simple recipe for anyone to lose weight if they don’t care about any of the consequences, including straight dying. So then is there any point for losing weight to them ?

It reminds me of the rule of metrics: when you replace a complex goal with an easy to mesure number, that number will be optimized irrelevant of the complex goal being met or not.

My personal position is that people should accept there’s no simple and universal rule if they deal with a complex system. And god are our bodies complex.

I've read that "Your body adjusts to input, so it's not that easy!" many times now. I don't dispute it is true.

But why not call the body's bluff? Cut input further! And then cut it again. Be more stubborn than your body.

Not saying it would be easy. It would probably be really hard. Not sure if I could actually do it if I had to. But surely, it is possible?! What little physics I know seems to strongly support it.

What people (me included) take issue with is not wether it’s easy or not, but if it makes any sense.

People with health conditions that directly depend on them losing weight will need specific ways, adapted to them, to lose that weight. Telling them “just eat less dumbass” (which is an actual advice thrown at people, almost verbatim) is condescending, ignoring the complexity of dieting, and only looking at it short term when they are trying to change the rest of their life.

We wouldn’t throw “money in/money out” mantras at random bankrupt people (or do we? I can’t tell anymore), we shouldn’t do that to overweight people either.

> We wouldn’t throw “money in/money out” mantras at random bankrupt people (or do we? I can’t tell anymore), we shouldn’t do that to overweight people either.

The entire personal finance sphere is based around this advice. Make a budget, cut costs, get spending under income enough to pay off debt. So yes, we do distill it down to “money in/money out” for people who mismanage their money. Fortunately, when it comes to money it generally is that simple, provided the income is sufficient to maintain the basic necessities of life.

For finance, is it that simple ? I agree I would see that for families that have a decently balanced budget but need to build assets to get out of the borderline red zone.

For people straight in the red, more often than not the advices I've seen applied IRL are akin to talking to one's bank to reevaluate the situation, checking with local institutions how they can help, reviewing tax declarations, giving up on too low paying jobs to completely change their status etc.

To me these changes are often more structural or complicated than just deciding where the money goes or to how much extent.

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