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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

I agree that a salmon filet is tasty. I don't often eat a pound of strawberries though. Both of those are too expensive to eat regularly, and like you said a salmon filet is a lot of effort compared to a burger.

> I'll have the cheesecake if I really feel like it.

That tells me the writing on the wall, and let me be clear about this, the writing is what needs to be written and what people need to read - you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it. It's a game of weighing the pros and cons and learning to be satisfied with what you know you should have instead of turning around one day and loving the healthy food more than the unhealthy.

Just as an aside: > I assert most people will enjoy a baked potato with a bit of butter (~1 cal/gram) about as much as garlic bread (~3 to 4 cal/gram).

You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.

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> you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it.

Chiming in as someone whom the GP comment resonates with: the point here is that you literally come to enjoy it less. The natural amount that you would eat isn't constrained entirely by health choices. I find finishing a single slice of cheesecake to be overwhelming: a second one would be actively unpleasant.

If you were following your assumptions here to their conclusions, you would conclude that people who eat unhealthily would eat cheesecake 24/7 if it weren't for conscious health choices. This is trivially untrue, no?

The original claim was that losing weight requires constant extra discomfort, and GP's (and my) claim is that this is false: you can move yourself (with initial discomfort) to an equilibrium that's more comfortable _and_ healthier than the status quo.

I feel the discomfort of constraining myself much less often now than I did when I ate like you. This is again trivial: if your preferences are aligned with healthy eating, you need to push against them less.

For whatever it's worth, I don't feel like I actually had to adapt my tastes at all in order to eat healthier. The main hurdle was figuring out how to prep in a way that's easy enough that I'll actually bother.

I wouldn't describe myself as actively adapting my tastes: I just ate better and eventually noticed my preferences shifting. I assume it's some combination of my brain getting more sensitive to the stimulus (of eg sugar), my gut changing, and my better diet reducing cravings.

> I ate like you

That's a weird judgement to throw in the midst. I haven't laid claim to my eating habits. I've had great success in losing weight in the past as well as recently by changing my eating habits for the positive. I just wanted people to realize that it's not always just a matter of learning to love yummy veggies and forgetting about icky cheesecake.

> if your preferences are aligned with healthy eating, you need to push against them less.

Agreed - but people have to accept that their preferences aren't always and possibly not ever going to align with healthy eating.

> That's a weird judgement to throw in the midst.

Sorry, I wasn't implying anything by this. Just absent-minded phrasing.

> people have to accept that their preferences aren't always and possibly not ever going to align with healthy eating.

Sure, I think it's possible some people can't make it through the transition to healthier preferences. That doesn't suggest that the original claim in the thread is correct.

The comment you originally responded to claimed that convexfunction was "restating" the claim that weight loss is pure effortful discomfort (from the top of the thread). Your response was that you doubt that healthy food can taste as good as junk food[1]. In the comment I responded directly to, you say that having cheesecake occasionally is evidence that a healthy person eating less cheesecake comes from conscious healthy effort.

These claims are what I'm pushing back against. I use way less willpower on food now than when I was a junkier eater[2].

[1] Note that the issue here might be that your definition of weight-loss-promoting foods is askew. Steak is a pretty reasonable part of a weight-loss diet, as long as you're not mindless about the quantity. As with the cheesecake example, eating the right amount of steak is a way more pleasant experience than eating too much.

[2] though thankfully never as bad as the avg US upper-middle-class diet

> That tells me the writing on the wall, and let me be clear about this, the writing is what needs to be written and what people need to read - you're making the decision to NOT have cheesecake when you only kind of feel like it. It's a game of weighing the pros and cons and learning to be satisfied with what you know you should have instead of turning around one day and loving the healthy food more than the unhealthy.

Let me rephrase: since changing my diet to include more low-energy-density foods (and being deliberate about eating large portions of them), I find myself less frequently even considering having dessert after dinner.

> You're discounting the calories / gram of butter in your first calculation and including it in the second.

No? I'll put 7g of butter (50 calories) on a 300g potato (280 calories) and not at all feel like I needed more butter. Even if you double that amount of butter, it comes out to 1.2 cal/g.

Do you weigh everything you eat?

Not quite everything, but outside of rare social eating situations I do weigh my food when I'd otherwise have to make a bad estimate for caloric content (i.e. not single-serving packaged food or food from a restaurant that publishes nutrition facts). I also track my calories, though I'll willfully go over my daily calorie target whenever I feel like it with approximately no guilt.

I'm sure this has contributed to the success of my "diet" -- I also started lifting weights again in this period -- but the comment I was originally replying to was about how weight loss requires discomfort, and the energy density thing has been the key insight for me on how to make it not require discomfort. I see now it reads like I was solely attributing my weight loss to this one weird trick (though I do think it's been the most important factor), so, mea culpa.

Fair enough. I've had excellent success with just calorie tracking / weighing without massively changing my diet - by setting a small caloric deficit I was able to consistently slowly weight over months without massively changing things and enjoying all my usual foods.

I'm glad your system has worked for you.

How are 2 egg size potatos and salmon fillet in an over a lot of effort?

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