> ignore diets and supplements and, instead, just aim to cut out junk like processed and fried foods.
In other words... go on a diet?
In other words... go on a diet?
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.
The first problem with that simple math is that calorie counts on packaging can be off by a substantial amount. In the United States, the FDA allows calorie counts on packaging to be as inaccurate as 20%.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3605747/
This doesn't mean all foods are going to deviate by 20% but that potential is there, and even around a 7% over or underestimation can still be a big deal if you're really going to be bean-counting calories to such an extent.
Good luck accurately determining your individual BMR with a simple calculator (Harris-Benedict formula) or your TDEE. Those formulae can be off by hundreds of calories, and are likely to be even less accurate the more obese a person is.
> If you do this, you will lose weight whether you get all those calories from only burgers or from lean chicken salad.
If, hypothetically, someone drinks milkshakes day in and day out, a 150 calorie TDEE deficit is going to be meaningless.
Energy substrates aren't equivalent. Every macro, and even different molecules have their own metabolic pathways and the body utilizes them in very different ways.
It's not only untenable, it's infeasible. The only way to "directly" calculate one's energy expenditure is to either place them inside a direct calorimeter or to use respiratory gas analysis, and to adhere to very strict protocols. And no, fitness bands and watches are not accurate enough to overcome the margin of error.
Sure, one can keep lowering the amount of food they eat until they get some kind of result from it. In that case, there's almost no point in trying any sort of BMR calculation flim-flam whatsoever. They'd be better off just eyeballing how much they eat and reducing the volume and the frequency.
Regardless, my point stands. Suggesting that the answer is to "simply" intake ~150 fewer calories of energy per day is to suggest that the vast majority of people are equipped with the skills and knowledge to even get close to that kind of accuracy in any sort of calculation. Maybe one can get lucky and see results from such a "simple" calculation because of their individual biology and eating habits, but the margin of error is still very high.
Let's set aside reality for a moment and pretend that calorie counts on packaging were perfectly accurate and that the Harris-Benedict equation works perfectly for everyone. That still wouldn't matter the inference of calories of food are/were measured as heat in a bomb calorimeter (i.e. setting food on fire and recording how much heat is emitted). The calorie count that appears on a food package is a guess based on the composition of macronutrients. With the exception of fiber, the calories of fat, protein, and carbs are combined together to form the single count based on how they typically burn in a calorimeter. This introduces more inaccuracy depending on the type of fiber since it may be fermented into digestible substrate.
The human body is nothing like a bomb calorimeter. It treats different forms of energy differently, and different forms of energy are utilized to varying amounts, and are even utilized differently in the presence of one another. If you take a dump, let it dry and then light it on fire, it will burn because there's excess energy being passed through and not converted to heat by the body. Food may pass faster or slower depending on what it's composed of. Fiber can not only do that but also prevent the digestion of nutrients. A diet that mixes lots of fat and carbs together facilitates the storage of more energy as fat than if either of them were eaten in isolation. Protein has more of a thermic effect (the body emitting more heat) than either carbs or fat.
Point being, if one really does not want to lose weight by actually choosing to eat foods that are appropriate for their digestive system, or to eat food that is low in energy density (ex. leafy greens), then they might as well cut down on food to such an extent that they would be able to notice it without punching numbers into a calculator. A substantial amount would have to be reduced from the diet to have a reasonable amount of confidence that one is indeed eating less energy than the body is expending in a day.
Staying active both burns calories directly, and iirc keeps your metabolism a bit above idle.
Both of these things make it easier to actually get that calorie deficit.
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.
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."
The comments like this are just noise from the folks that probably never had an issue with those stuff.
One can lose weight by eating nothing but plant leaves. Is that "good" food or a "good" diet? Such a diet would be unsustainable in the long run simply because said food is neither dense enough in energy nor dense enough in nutrients. That doesn't sound particularly good to me. But many people equate salad to being "healthy", such that they will add lettuce to the things they actually want to eat because of a mystical believe that plant material is inherently good.
People like to reduce it to 2 binary things as usual, but there is nothing simple or easy or cheap about maintaining your health. Its extremely hard.
You need to measure things yourself all the time, know a lot of theory, and experiment a lot, because due to bio-individuality you can extrapolate from other people findings in a limited manner.
It seems merely sane to consider as "Not-Food" slurries or cakes of highly processed or synthetic carbon-based chemicals that are only distantly sourced from plants or animals, and to consider as "Is-Food" items that are very directly harvested from plants or animals.
Look at bread: one must work quite hard to find ANY "bread" product that does not contain sugar in significant quantities. That is not bread, it is cake. Sugar in significant amounts has toxic effects on the body.
Look at mayonnaise: most of it has significant quantities of Omega-6 oils. This is because the actual recipes for mayonnaise contain omega-3s, but Omega-3s have short shelf life. Omega-6s also have substantially toxic effects over the long term, yet almost everything on the grocery shelves is made with them.
There are scores more examples in basic staples.
The food supply has been massively corrupted primarily for the benefit of the manufacturers, to increase sales and convenience. That does not mean that it is still actual food.
Literally, merely changing my basic cheese sandwiches to actual (non-sugar) bread and eliminating store mayo (usually using just olive oil or occasionally mixing mayo fresh) has had a substantially positive effect on my health. It also tastes FAR better.
So, I don't consider it to be a diet to merely select actual food instead of the industrial products sold as food — I still eat nominally the same sandwich recipe every lunch as before, just with real ingredients, and I get better enjoyment and results.
In the US at least, the word "diet" always implies some kind of calorie reduction and specific food choices. Things like "paleo diet" or "low-carb diet" define specific things to eat and not eat. The term "dieting" is associated with being in a caloric deficit, ostensibly to lose weight.
Avoiding ultra-processed and fried foods is not "dieting" in that sense, any more than choosing to eat one thing over another.
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.
I'd argue it's not a diet, it's "avoid damaging your body with toxins" and very valid and useful life choice.
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.