We’ve reached peak wellness and most of it is nonsense (2019)

What if it is a 5 acre rural property with nearby trails and such?

I guess your logic is, walking for needed stuff is more motivation than just plain walking?

I suppose, for some. Others I know just uber and uber eats everything, and amazon for groceries, and so on...

At least where I live, I have to walk around inside the grocery store myself...

Don’t expect something as subjective as happiness to also be rational.

In my teen years, I felt trapped where I grew up so I moved to NYC.

In my early 20s, I couldn’t afford Manhattan so I moved to the suburbs.

In my mid 20s, I felt trapped in the suburbs so I moved [back] to NYC.

In my early 30s, I felt trapped in NYC and just recently moved back to the suburbs.

In 15-20 years, I’ll probably think along the lines of folks who say they want a pied-a-terre in NYC for the (non-winter) weekends and suburbs during the week.

Actually it's even more simple. You don't need to eat healthier or move around more. You simply need to consume approx 100-150 calories less than you burn per day (BMR + additional activities).

If you do this, you will lose weight whether you get all those calories from only burgers or from lean chicken salad.

Coming from a standard westernized diet high in processed foods, you'll probably lose some weight just by changing makeup of diet, but if you're overweight you won't lose all of the excess without sustained caloric restriction.

The comments like this are just noise from the folks that probably never had an issue with those stuff.

I'll give the article credit for mentioning processed foods, but otherwise, many people and even experts disagree on what makes a food healthy. Telling people to just not "eat crap" and to cut out processed and fried foods is barely specific enough to be useful.

The utility of eating a specific diet is that it actually identifies what foods should be avoided and why. If uneducated individuals just "eat healthy", they are likely to do things that either won't work or will backfire in the long run.

> A lot of people think a diet is this magical thing that makes it easy for you

Yes, because that's what an appropriate diet tends to do. When you eat a diet that doesn't overly engage the Randle cycle or raise insulin, losing body fat usually follows whether one counts their calories or not. If someone is overweight and they eat a low insulinogenic diet, and their food is satiating, both their eating frequency and their biology is likely to shift to not hold on to so much body fat anymore. The only thing that's not easy about such a diet is not being tempted by all the common foods that interfere with the metabolism.

> you really just have to eat healthier foods

That means very little. What does that mean? Eating Raisin Bran? Eating lots of leaves? Cutting out red meat? Eating lots of fruit?

> move around in general

Moving around can certainly help, but for weight loss and maintenance, it's far more efficient to eat an appropriate fuel substrate and to not eat excessively. You could burn 235 calories climbing the Empire State building for 30 minutes, or you could simply not eat those 235 calories and do something more interesting or productive with that time.

This isn't to say that there aren't possible cardiovascular benefits from exercise, but it's not as efficient for fat burning as people think. For most of that 30 minutes the human body will be burning primarily glucose, so unless one is fasted they won't be shredding fat from the second they start climbing those stairs.

> the truth is that it ultimately comes down to choosing foods that are good for you

Again, any individual is unlikely to actually know what that means or come to a consensus with the next person on what that means. "eat healthy" means nothing.

> rather than taking diet pills

Yeah, they probably shouldn't do that.

> or doing some extreme diet like keto or carnivore

Neither of those are particularly "extreme" except that they eliminate many of the things that cause the human body to keep holding on to fat. As it turns out, they're both low-insulin diets, and the latter diet is the one that is most species-appropriate out of just about any other diet.

No one has to eat keto or carnivore, but to suggest people shouldn't eat either form of diet is based on... what, exactly?

> And that can be _hard_, because eating good food and being lazy are very easy to do and can be quite enjoyable.

I agree. Eating good food is easy and enjoyable once one breaks past the standard advice of "eat healthy."

Where are you and others here on HN getting this idea that a diet necessarily means something temporary?

Most diets that aren't hypocaloric are meant to be a lifestyle. An actually healthful diet can promote health and weight loss without restricting calories or being a temporary measure, and such diets are usually more successful in the long run than telling people to eat leaves and wiggle a lot. When a diet is sufficient for daily needs, there's no need for it to be temporary, then it shouldn't be a diet but the diet for a given person.

> junk food

As an aside, most people have no idea what that even is. Raisin Bran is arguably junk food, but most people wouldn't think to classify it as such. Some people think eggs are junk food.

In other words... exactly what the article recommends. Cutting out processed and fried foods eliminates a lot of the standard diet the average American eats. It might sound moderate to just suggest those two things, but it's really not.

Reducing or eliminating processed foods means little to no pancakes, breakfast cereals of any kind, toast, frozen meals, pop tarts, chips, granola bars, sodas, shelf-stable juices, Starbucks lattes, mac 'n cheese, cured meats, energy bars, and on and on and on.

Likewise, for fried foods that would mean little to no french fries, curly fries, onion rings, potato chips, fried chicken, fish and chips, corn dogs, doughnuts, churros, etc.

Maybe to those on HN would find it easy to cut out those foods, but a large amount of Americans eat a substantial amount of those things every day due to their availability, affordability, and addictive qualities.

What we end up with when aiming "to cut out junk like processed and fried foods" really isn't that far off from low carb diets, paleo, vegan, "Mediterranean", keto, or even carnivore. They all restrict or eliminate the things the author of the article suggests cutting out in such few words.

> The term "dieting" is associated with being in a caloric deficit, ostensibly to lose weight.

Do you mean to tell me that vegans aren't eating a diet unless they're trying to lose weight? What about those eating low carb for possible longevity reasons rather than calorie restriction or weight loss?

Honestly, as someone who has lived in the US their entire lives, I've never heard of this strange parallel definition of what it means to be on a diet. People can be on diets for any number of reasons, whether it's for longevity, inflammation, athletic performance, or weight loss. It's contextual. If a person's intent is to be on some kind of specific diet (and as I went over already, a no-processed-no-fried diet is actually quite specific), then they are on a diet.

Wellness as a business is around forever...

FYI I'm old enough to have been able to actually see the explosion of supplements and the rise of the supplement industry. It's crazy how much shelf space even in a standard grocery store is taken up by everything from acai berry to zinc lozenges, of which maybe 10% have even promising evidence for being beneficial[1]. Note that Zinc is among the 10%, showing good evidence for reducing the length and severity of colds.

However, there are people making a lot of money, and the advice given in this article can't be sold in bottle.

1 https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-...

I’d be curious to see it. Why those factors but not others? Why is spirituality segregated from cognitive or mental health, broadly? How are these terms experimentally defined?