Comment by oifjsidjf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oifjsidjf | Hacker News Reader

Imagine cutting up your own stomach instead of admiting to yourself that you have changed your diet incorrectly...sad state of humanity.

Or using drugs...

Weight loss can be done with food only.

"Reducing calories" is NOT a good way to loose weight and KEEP IT off as it's unsustainable due to hunger.

The general dietary patterns that one finds across tribal people/historyical are two: 1) high carb, low fat 2) high fat, low carb.

Pick one and stick to it.

As long as you mix carbs and fats the body goes crazy since due to the Randle cycle the body cannot effectively process both at the same time + it causes blood sugar buildup.

Guess what kind of a diet is the Western diet? The one that MIXES fats and carbs in HIGH AMOUNTS (eg 40% carbs, 40% fat, 20% protein as calories).

Such a diet is cancer.

Also do note that some obese people will NOT see weight loss for the 1st few months at all if they have a chronicaly elevated insulin, which can take months to normalize. And until insulin falls down to a normal level it's IMPOSSIBLE to lose fat since insulin is KEEPING the fat in the fat cells.

Anecdotal evidence, but no obese person I’ve ever talked to about this (including me) is unaware that changing their diet would lead to a reduction in their bodyweight. Smokers also know that not smoking would improve their health significantly. Drug addicts know that drugs are extremely dangerous. Nobody is questioning that obesity can be undone through dietary approaches, just as it’s possible to quit harmful relationships with tobacco and drugs cold-turkey. The problem with these approaches is that they just don’t work at the population level. Obesity is massively costly to society and a burden on individuals. Rejecting effective treatments because they’re not natural, or involve invasive surgery, doesn’t make any sense to me if it means adults who would otherwise live their entire adult lives in ill health would have longer, happier lives with much lower medical costs.

People who are obese could switch to a diet of only red meat -- they would never feel hungry again, since such a diet is massively satiating and they would be free to utterly gorge themselves, and they would also not be obese, since a diet of only red meat is perfectly suited to human health and fitness.

Feelings of hunger are not the only reason people eat.

On the carnivore diet people are free to eat as much beef as they want for any reason other than hunger as well.

I don’t think we need to be rejecting it as an option today but I also hope we don’t just settle on “oh that’s just how we deal with it” long term.

I don't think gp's point is that surgery or pills are should never be considered. Just that as a nation we should look into the actual cause of obesity and try to address that instead of trying to find more ways to cope with our lifestyle.

There is to a degree phycological reasons for our obesity issues but I think most of the country is just misinformed about what's healthy. I heard in a company meeting recently that we should avoid saturated fat and use more trans fats in our diet. I still see my mom pursue low fat options in most dairy products which usually means more sugar to compensate for taste. Many people still think that things like large quantities of grains, cereals and fruit juice are healthy and unharmful.

You are making unorthodox claims and are going to need a bit more citation here. I can also point to the Mediterranean diet that is moderately high in fats (olive oil) and carbs, yet was not considered a disaster.

Further, it's making unwarranted value judgements about surgery - it's essentially an appeal to nature.

Surgery and drugs definitely feel like a Plan C or D. There are subconscious and cultural aspects to food that those don't address.

For one thing, in a lot of cases, the worst food to eat is also the cheapest to buy and the easiest to prepare and the most profitable to market.

I think most people who are overweight or out of shape know it and also know how to start to fix it. But habits and carbs and sugars are a hell of a combo, and it almost requires an "event" (something beyond a simple "diagnosis") to get people motivated. And that doesn't even work universally.

Blaming it on the person if you're in America is mostly wrong. HFCS and sugar is in literally everything. It's super expensive to buy healthy food. You have to drive everywhere so you don't get the exercise.

Can weight loss be done with food only? Sure. Is it affordable or attainable for the average american? Not really.

It's ok to be accountable for what you eat when you do have choices.

America has a food regulation problems that drive a variety of obesity-related problems. America also has a laziness problem that is almost mandated by suburban sprawl and automobile-oriented urban centers.

Most Americans have severely limited food choices. But even those who don't are subject to marketing and sugar-addiction that leads to bad food choices even when better choices are at hand.

Still, it's ok to hold accountable a person for buying and drinking two 20-ounce sugar-coffees for breakfast and then heading to the local strip mall to eat dinner at the restaurant that only serves 2000mg sodium meals--the affordability of vegetables was not the problem.

> It's super expensive to buy healthy food.

Fresh veggies are the cheapest thing in a grocery store. And you don't need to buy the organic/exotic ones to "eat healthy" from the perspective of losing weight.

You know what's expensive? Junk food. For the price of a single bag of chips I can buy several pounds of carrots.

It's not just an issue of healthy food being expensive. If you're obese, cutting your food intake in half will save you 50% of your food expense. That's a lot.

Keeping the same budget, you could most probably eat healthier in smaller quantities.

Although cost might be still be an issue for some, the main problem is education and culture, and these are harder to change: even if you can afford healthy food, you're unlikely to seek it if you have no appreciation for it.

Education and culture only goes so far. The school system has been trying to teach children healthy diet and exercise habits for several decades, but it just doesn't seem to stick. Not that we should stop, but it seems like obesity has more to with a lack of willpower to resist overeating rather than ignorance of how to eat healthily and that exercise should be regular.

Those patterns will only work if they also reduce calories though. The vast majority of people who are normal weight in the western world will have a mixed diet and their body is not 'going crazy'.

Easiest thing to do is just make a rule for yourself that you will never eat anything that isn't beef.

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