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Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22032

Whilst I imagine that this paper is technically sound, the entire discussion around weight loss on HN is utterly bizarre.

So there are pollutants that mildly increase appetite or decrease basal metabolic rate.

If you're gaining weight and don't want to, the knobs of diet and exercise are still there, they don't go away simply because the number of calories you need changes a bit.

Fast food and ready meals are in plastic containers. There is almost certainly a link between those and obesity. But you can eat both and be thin, or muscular and lean, or any body type you want really, if you modulate their use.

People budget all of the time with their money, but ask them to do it with food and it's like you have two heads.

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If you've ever tried to lose weight though, you know how it can become a struggle--you're doing fine for a few days or weeks, then suddenly it's like an invisible switch flips and you might spend a day having an intense battle of willpower. Then the next day you might be fine again. It's reasonable to want to know the root cause(s) of those seemingly random struggles, imo.

Edit: this comment isn't as relevant after the original was edited, alas

Sorry, I didn't mean to change the substance of my comment.

What you've written makes sense. I feel that "relapse" carries strong connotations of ongoing failure though, not just like, having a couple of rough days.

Food isn't like alcohol or heroin or gambling or whatever whereby one binge day can really fuck you up. You don't get skinny by skipping meals for a day, and you don't get fat by eating 6000 calories in a day once.

No worries :) I mostly agree. With the caveat that, IME, it's easy for one bad "trigger day" to throw you completely off track, and perhaps lead to the full "relapse" you describe. Certainly not in the same sense that heroin or gambling could do so (unless maybe you have a food addiction).

One of the core skills of keeping any daily habit is to not get so discouraged by momentary lost progress that you give up the whole game; but that's easier said than done.

Another part of the messy reality of weight loss is that some people "successfully" lose weight, but then "relapse" because they just feel like shit at the lower weight despite it allegedly being healthier.

IMO the strongest argument against "just use willpower!" is that skinny people from other countries, with evidently-healthy eating habits, routinely move to the US and then pack on pounds.

How can someone already in this society be expected to fight it successfully, when the typical result for someone coming into it with a lifetime of healthy eating behind them and a good BMI is that they find themselves struggling with weight in short order?

Which isn't to say don't try, but also indicates to me that there's a 0% chance we're going to willpower our way out of the obesity epidemic, and it indicates to me that willpower is not the key factor in keeping other countries skinnier than us. If that's all we've got, we're just gonna keep getting fatter.

[EDIT] Though, full disclosure, I think our problems are deep, structural, and tied heavily to our kinda-awful and very messy "culture" and "society", such as they are, so am not optimistic we're capable of fixing this even if we knew exactly what to do.

You're right, but you're confusing some factors here I think.

The US has higher calorie fast foods, larger default portions, and walking is involved far less in the typical day than in most countries.

That means that if you just do what feels natural, in the US you're going to be eating more and doing less exercise than you would elsewhere.

That's not an argument against willpower, it's in fact the opposite. In the US _more_ willpower is required - you're explicitly going against the norm to an extent, if you move to e.g. Paris and get the metro and walk everywhere then by default you're going to be eating less and exercising more.

I don't think that anyone is claiming that we can reduce the statistical incidence of obesity via willpower. It's more that you, as an individual, can choose to be healthy. It's empowering and therefore important to know that.

It's not a HN-exclusive thing. This is just the universal take on weight loss which happens to also pervade throughout HN.

Weight loss always creates an enormously contentious discussion because for so many people it is interpreted as a personal indictment of their choices and behaviour.

I fully agree with your whole post, from a background of general fitness (healthy diet, heavy daily exercise), and because I've been through the process of losing weight. It was difficult (at first), and is still sometimes difficult maintaining it.

If I hadn't experienced that weight loss experience (and the success it brought), and if I ate worse, didn't exercise, and weighed 10kg+ more, I'm sure something in my brain would probably lean me towards disagreeing with the simple model of weight loss. I'm sure I'd also look for blame elsewhere and look for workarounds, which a multi-million dollar industry would happily (not) provide.

Humans are funny.

Thanks for your post.

Something I think about a lot is that fundamentally people don't treat physical activity and their diet as seriously as they would if it were really a priority. I include myself in that even as someone who works out often.

A software developer might sit in a chair for 8 hours a day on mental pursuits. But on the main page of HN, there's a "15 minute stretching routine" for people to do to help with pains. Not so they can be fit mind, so that they can manage sitting in that chair.

The whole mindset is bonkers. If you manage to get the balance of physical to mental to even be 20%/80%, hell let's do 10%/90%, and you treat your diet even 50% as well as you treat your financial budget, you will almost certainly be in fantastic shape compared to most of your peer group.

That's quite alright.

On the exercise front, it might be just due to most people not finding "their sport". When people find exercise they enjoy, it can easily start taking up a lot of their time and fulfilling that physical/mental balance you mentioned.

I think a lot of people take up rather cliche sports/exercises simply for weight loss, and thinking of it that way just doesn't stick. Running is the big one. I love running myself and I know many people who also do, but it seems like the go-to "lose weight exercise", and a lot of people seem to hate it.

Sometimes the path to start a sport / exercise you love can be very strange. I was pretty out of shape last year this time and July/August I just spontaneously decided to walk home from work (1.5 hour walk) and that stuck as a daily thing. One of those walks made me mull over joining a gym, so I did that and have been almost every day since last August. The treadmill there shunted me onto running outside, and revisiting a sport I did when I was younger (orienteering), and sports kept stacking on top, as well as interest in nutrition and health.

I lost about 15kg, taking me from overweight to the lower/middle of healthy, with a lot more strength and I'm barely ever ill now compared to before.

I could easily have not walked home on that day and none of it would have happened. I'd probably still be overweight (and unhappy). It was just random really. I know that doesn't help most people, but it's what I've found with myself and others. A few people I've gotten to know through the gym and other sports is that the "kick" was either a health scare or being in a dark place, and using exercise as an outlet got them into a way better place than they were before.

You just have to be so careful not to relapse though. There can just as easily be a kick in the other direction, and I try to keep that in mind.

Agree with all of this.

I hate running. Cardio is my weakpoint in general. I enjoy cycling, but only with a purpose, like if I go from A to B to pick something up.

I would also say though that personally, I find going to work and doing the 9-5 way way harder than going to the gym.

My main source of confusion in life is that maximising money (not just having enough to survive but actively maximising it and giving up all of your time in order to do so) is standard, but maximising health is just like, I mean whatever, maybe.

I feel like you could give most people ten million dollars and they still wouldn't get in shape.

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