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Comment by brad0 | Hacker News Reader

I just read this review of The Hungry Brain. It sounds interesting and matches some anecdotal experience I’ve had.

Basically: eat boring food. I live in the USA but I grew up in Australia. The USA is big on highly rewarding food. Australia is too, but not to the level the USA is.

Whenever I go back to Australia, I will always lose 5-10 pounds without changing anything about my diet. It’s just less rewarding to our cave man brain.

When I come back to the USA, the weight comes back just as quick as it comes off.

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This sounds like the saddest way to lose weight though…Like using abstinence as means of birth control and STD prevention.

Yeah, I'd rather make good food exciting. One of the things I love about living in California is the good produce. So many vegetables are delicious just roasted (until you get some carmelization) with a little olive oil and salt. Just stellar when fresh out of the oven or off the grill.

Thats not sad.

Looking up the actual meaning of chemical names from ingredients in fine print on every damn thing you eat, and filtering in and out based on gossip hype superfood of the year... is sad. Very sad.

Eat boring food is solid advice.

Veggies, fruits, no bullshit carbs and protein, stuff that grows in the region where you live. Takes some effort to search and then its just autopilot mode.

That’s not boring food to me! I can cook very exciting meals from what you mentioned. If you meant “avoid junk food” than I agree, but the alternative to processed food doesn’t have to be boring.

I think that “boring” here means “low sugar, few additives”. And yes, you can cook even better tasting food with pure ingredients and the right spices and cooking methods. But I also like to cook “boring” most of the time, in the sense of “giving my body something fulfilling with expectable taste”.

Boring here refers to "nothing new".

It can be made super sexy and delicious. But it needs making. Point I was trying to make is its not hard after a few tries.

A more apt comparison would be sex vs pornography.

Both junk food and pornography hijack the reward center of your brain. Whereas real food and sex are both normal, healthy things.

Was it this review? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry...

This also lines up with my anecdotal experience, and the best boring food I've ever found were potatoes. I used to avoid them because of the carb content, but they always seem to give me good energy while also being 'filling'. If you look up various satiety indices, potatoes always seem to be at the top, even higher than most meats.

With regular consumption, I've found simple, unprocessed potatoes to become very boring even while being very satiating. It's strange, like I have this strong psychological urge to consume something with more exciting flavor to it (i.e. processed food) while being completely satisfied physically. Regardless, I think it's a food that can really help people who struggle to lose weight.

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