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Comment by thaanpaa | Hacker News Reader

It requires that complexity because a metric shit ton of scientific research shows that it is more complicated than that.

Permanent weight loss of more than ten pounds is nearly impossible from a scientific standpoint. The success rate after 5 years of weight loss is somewhere around 0.1%. You'd think that if it was as easy as everyone claims, more people would succeed. Heck, many people who have had gastric bypass surgery regain a significant amount of weight, even if their stomachs have been reduced to the size of a ping pong ball.

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And yet I personally know several people who have dropped more than 10 pounds, and have kept it off (or even lost more) for more than 5 years. The statistical odds are meaningless on an individual basis. In most cases what it took was hitting some sort of low point and then making a major, permanent lifestyle change such as committing to a daily exercise program or quitting drinking (alcoholic drinks contain a lot of empty calories).

https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/david-goggins-how-to-bui...

My weight floats in a range that's 40-50 pounds lighter today than I was a decade ago. It's because I eat less and move more.

Physically, weight-loss is utterly trivial. Literally everything that people say works, does. Eat less calories, eat less sugar, cut out snacking, cut out liquid calories, cut out processed food, reduce carbs, literally any and all of those work, choose whichever is most appealing to the individual.

The challenge to weight and diet in America is mental and cultural. Obese people remain obese because they have unhealthy relationships with food and eat addictively or emotionally, using food to soothe anxiety, depression, loneliness, disappointment, etc and because cultural norms and advertising have normalized obesity-causing diets.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Fully agree.

The science of body metabolism is hard. But the rules for weight loss are simple: move more, eat less. For some people it's just "Move more, eat the same".

"Eat less" means "less calories", volume can be the same - really helps.

PS chips are a crime against humanity

Not even that, if you change what you eat, you can have a dramatic effect as well. Try cutting out carbs and sugar as much as possible, results in two weeks.

Changing when you eat is a factor too.

I would suggest to be careful with cutting out things, this leads to bouncing back, like all dramatic changes.

I noticed that carbs such as bread or pasta really help with food satisfaction, unlike fat-intence or protein foods.

Remove sugar in secondary things: tea, coffee, soda. Understand the calorie count in carbs such as chips. East to the mild calorie deficit. Compensate with moderate excercise. And so on, setup new dietary habits one by one.

It doesn't have to be painful!

> It doesn't have to be painful!

Agreed; but it is work. And for a great many people, that is an issue.

As many other things in life it cab be seen as work.

My journey to effective body weight control was 10 years long. Misinformation is everywhere these days...

But... it doesn't have to be hard. For me gamification of the calorie couting game and step counting worked surprisingly well.

> Physically, weight-loss is utterly trivial. Literally everything that people say works, does.

You can't say this on HN, where weight loss is a myth and the only way out is to take a crazy life-altering medicine. Exercise? PFFT. I walked a flight of stairs once, and did not lose a single gram.

Do you have a citation on that 0.1%? I'd love to learn more.

The number one in a thousand is simply a ballpark figure that is frequently used in nutritional science. There are literally hundreds of papers, and not all of them are good (you should look at the parameters because many of them are quite lax), but here are a few examples easily found online.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030646...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/(SICI)1098-1...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07315724.1999.10...

https://europepmc.org/article/med/2663745

Perhaps you should read your own sources. From the abstract of the second study: "At the 3-year follow-up, 53% of the original sample (of 621 persons) maintained losses of 5% or more and 35% losses of 10% or more.". From the third study: "When successful weight maintenance was defined as maintaining a weight loss of 5% or 10% of initial (pre-treatment) body weight, 40% were maintaining a 5% weight loss at five years and 25% were maintaining a weight loss of 10% at 7 years." The other studies also don't back up your 0.1% estimate.

Your initial statement is completely misleading and shockingly you have provided hard evidence against it.

Perhaps you didn't read what I wrote. You really need to look at the parameters (as well as the data).

A 5% weight loss for a 200-pound person equals 10 pounds. Anyone can achieve this by following a fad diet for a week or two.

Here is what you wrote:

> Permanent weight loss of more than ten pounds is nearly impossible from a scientific standpoint. The success rate after 5 years of weight loss is somewhere around 0.1%.

Your sources indicate that your initial statement was wrong by a factor of ~100 at least.

If you deliberately misinterpret what I'm saying, I suppose I'm mistaken.

The majority of these studies consider a weight loss of 10 pounds over two years to be successful. If you start with 100 pounds or more, that is almost nothing.

Many of them consider anyone who starts at 300, loses 100, and gains 80 back in five years to be a huge success. Is it really?

In healthcare, an obese person is typically considered successful if they lose more than 30% of their body weight permanently. This is extremely unlikely to happen without surgery or medication.

Mate these studies are very clearly talking about percentages here, so they are directly comparable. You said 0.1% could lose 10 pounds over five years, the studies you cited mention 25-35% are able to do at least that after five years - the average man in the US is 200 pounds, and these are obese people, so the loss was actually higher than 10 pounds. Now you are changing the goal posts to 30%!

A good diet and exercise routine can have wonderful results, even in the long-term. The percentage of success in losing significant weight with those methods is far, far above 0.1%, and I think people should be aware of that.

I understand that you don't mean 10 pounds in a strict sense but even 20 pounds is an easily achievable and sustainable goal for fellow overweight 40-something HN readers.

It doesn't take more than restricted calorie intake and moderate excercise (walking, gym, etc). After a few cycles of gain/loss it becomes easier food consumption habits change

yup, the stomach gradually expands and the weight returns. Really hard to beat the body.

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