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Comment by itsthejb | Hacker News Reader

Better food, yes. But also LESS food. I know it’s controversial to say so, but getting fat is a result of _eating too much!_. Yes, calorie dense food sure speeds up the process, but at the end of the day it’s a deficit between calories in, and calories burnt.

Source: experimented a fair amount with dieting/fasting in my 30s. When you talk about this with people, it’s startling how many believe that skipping some meals is dicing with death. Hardly surprising people struggle to lose weight, when they refuse to try changing the key variables

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> When you talk about this with people, it’s startling how many believe that skipping some meals is dicing with death.

Hahahaha, this, yes.

Last summer during a whole company offsite we happened to play some quizz game where you had to give the nearest answer. One question was « How much time could you survive without eating anything except water ? ».

Boy did I won this guess by trying a random « 30 days » because I knew world records are amounted in months. The other answers were all, without exceptions, around 2 to 3 days and nothing more than a week.

I think it's controversial not because it's false, but because calorie density variation in food is huge, a full order of magnitude, so only reducing quantity is not the best strategy in most cases.

100g of fries is about 250kcal, 100g of cabbage is around 30

You can quite literally eat 10 times as much cabbage as fries to have the same amount of calories

And eating less triggers a feeling of hunger (at least at the beginning), which makes following through harder.

> 100g of fries is about 250kcal, 100g of cabbage is around 30

Cookies, chocolate, etc. easily exceed 500kcal/100g.

Cheeses and some meat products, likewise. Plus there is something about milk products that makes them extra enticing. Tryptophan probably.

Beer is a serious calorie input too.

Kind of but you can eat a surprising amount of diced fruit and veg without sauce, or plain yoghurt, soup or boiled eggs or smoked fish without eating a lot of calories. I would eat 500/Kcal a day a couple of times a week and it actually wasn't too bad. I got out of the habit but might try it again in the summer.

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