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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

My favorite example of this is how to get stronger and healthier. There's no secret, and you actually don't have to do anything too extreme.

Exercise regularly, drink water, don't eat too much, mostly plants, get lots of asleep, avoid drugs and alcohol.

Now that I do so well with all that advice, I can't quite remember why that all sounded so hard or "boring" before.

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As with many things the hard part isn't understanding how they work - most people, deep down, already know what actually works. It's hard because it requires working against the part of your brain that wants to conserve energy, eat energy-dense foods, and surf the web late at night. Everybody who hasn't already built good habits wants there to be an easy, secret way to get the results without the effort (and it is effort. Once you've been doing it for a while it's very easy. But I remember how hard it was to build up to that point).

The same applies for finances, dating/socialization, and business. Everybody knows to save/invest money (maybe not exactly how to invest), to not be afraid of failure, to ask questions and take initiative, to talk to users and make customers happy. Our simple animalistic brains don't like to do those things if we don't have to. It's uncomfortable for many people.

1. Because you actually need protein to gain muscle mass, so there goes your "mostly plants" without a caveat about "vegetarian protein", which has its own set of problems.

2. Exercise regularly - what is regularly? What kind of exercise? You never had over-work injuries? Injuries from muscle / postural imbalances? Etc.

I concede that most of this advice is available for free, but unless you have a GOOD coach, you will get injured before you get results. Then there is plain doing too much.

Again, you can come back with "Well, I am just talking about not being obese" - in that case, yea, it's much simpler since you don't have to worry about getting enough protein and balancing that against becoming over-weight.

There's a universe between being obese and being even an impressive weightlifter.

If I can play with my kids (as in, actually run around on the playground), play sports at a casually competitive level, hike for several hours, and help my friends move heavy furniture, that enables a pretty full life. I don't think you'd disagree it's pretty simple to get there.

Besides, you can probably still gain a ton of functional strength while on a plant based diet anyway.

I do agree.

Vegan proteins are not absorbed as good as egg / whey but it's possible to structure a vegan diet to gain strength (eg. vegan protein shakes). Personally, I tried briefly and gave up.

There are impressive vegan athletes even if it's hard to say whether they built more or their muscle on a vegan diet or not.

That said, I agree with your message, getting stronger is not always easy.

None of these are terminal criticisms, and in fact can be rectified with just a bit more information or expert advisement.

You might argue that it means the advice isn't simple. I would counter that in the average case, it's simple enough. We are surrounded with material, examples and non-examples of the advice being followed to the point of it being tiresome.

For cases like injury and plant protein sources the information and talent is so readily available for someone of sufficient means to take action with, that the "complexity" won't matter after six months.

I am personally unable to program my diet / workouts to effective result, even with significant effort and over a decade of experience.

I gained 25kg on a vegan diet through a span of 5 years. You just have to eat a bit more than comfortable but protein digestibility is a non-issue. Stuff that I ate - tofu, seitan, tempeh are very low processed soy/wheat products and can very quickly give you more than 200g of protein a day.

For me, the biggest problem was meeting caloric needs. It's very hard to get to 3000kcal+ eating non-processed plants.

PDCAAS, DIAAS or similar "bioavailability" measurements are standardized on pigs bowels and are targeted towards malnutritioned individuals that border on starvation or suffer from kwashiorkor.

As for weightlifting, you can do rounded back (inefficient form) deadlifts smartly (not overdoing the load) and get strong enough.

Don't things like rice and potatoes give you a quick path to high calories?

I find vegan protein powders to taste better than whey which is kind of gross to me. (I’m not a vegan). They usually have a blend of 5 or so protein sources to balance out the amino acids.

If you need more calories then fat is by far the easiest.

> bioavailability

Are there estimates available that you find more compelling? I’ve been using PDCAAS as my metric since its the standard for daily value on nutrition labels.

Context: vegan for ~6 years, barbell strength training for a couple months now, and trying to eat to support muscle growth.

Vegan protein was good enough for a world record setting strength athlete [0][1]. This documentary [2], produced by James Cameron, made me <edit>go vegan, sometimes i eat animal protein but rarely, aware that my inflammation values will rise by 70% doing it</edit>. The oldest olympian on the pedestal for the US was 39,5 years old at the time and vegan.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrik_Baboumian [1] https://medium.com/four-pursuits-ventures/worlds-strongest-m...

[2] https://gamechangersmovie.com/

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