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Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

>the problems are lack of time for exercise and money for a healthy diet.

pretty much. You go to some circles that will keep swearing by "Calories in, Calories out", and blaming any detteral of this as laziness. It's basically the equivalent of saying "stop smoking" to a smoker. Yes, they are objectiely right, but also miss all the subtlety of the steps needed to "stop smoking".

Time is definitely the biggest factor, and modern society feels like it's demanding more time than ever of workers for less spending power than ever. Of course people don't have time to work on their diet/exercise when some are working 2+ jobs at barely above minimum wage.

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Where exactly is the nuance in this?

I pity the smoker more because they don’t have to smoke but feel compelled to smoke through addiction.

You have direct control over how many calories you consume and it’s a basic human instinct to eat.

Saying there’s nuanced steps inbetween is just a way to hand wave away someone’s laziness to not tackle the problem.

The same compulsion that drives the smoker to smoke drives the person that eats compulsively to eat. Be it for comfort or habit. Hormones and neurotransmitters drive behavior.

What gets deposited into your bank account and what gets stocked at your local grocery drives what you put into your body to survive.

If eating healthy is too expensive or outright impossible because of what is stocked at your local grocery and your hormones and neurotransmitters are telling you overwhelmingly to eat poorly... Is this laziness?

I'd argue that it's harder to quit compulsive eating than it is to quit compulsive smoking. You can't go cold turkey on food

That's true, you can't go cold turkey on food, but you can change what you eat. Gorging on fats and proteins and high density foods (nuts, cheeses, legumes, olive oil, eggs, etc) will have a very different effect than gorging on fats and sugars (pastries, white breads, soda etc.)

What does “going cold turkey on food” look like here? Because I’ve quit a pack-a-day-for-ten-years nicotine addiction, and I’ve dieted by slightly increasing exercise and slightly decreasing caloric consumption to produce a daily deficit of about 250-500 calories in line with mainstream medical recommendations, and I can tell you which I found harder… and it wasn’t drinking diet soda and walking around the block in the morning.

I suppose the cold turkey equivalent here is intermittent fasting. Disciplining yourself to ignore the most basic instincts of survival and eat at a specific time.

I never smoked nor fasted, so I can't really compare the two.

> I pity the smoker more because they don’t have to smoke but feel compelled to smoke through addiction.

We all feel compelled to eat.

A lot of cheap food does not satisfy hunger for as long as better food.

Just cutting calories in can make you feel less able to do things, so you automatically cut back on exercise.

People differ in many ways: metabolism, genetics, physical sicknesses, mental health, gut bacteria and probably many more things I cannot think of will change how the same diet affects different people, and their ability to exercise.

>>>Just cutting calories in can make you feel less able to do things, so you automatically cut back on exercise.

As someone who has dieted by cutting and counting calories. This wasn’t true, I didn’t have the energy for high intensity workouts sure but I did have the energy to walk a mile or two and the result is the same loss of calories as 2 mile run. Walking just takes a bit longer.

The important thing was drinking a lot of water or gassy things to feel full to quiet the urge to snack.

Also Deleting junk food, sodas , and beer completely from my pantry. Having coffee without cream, Replacing them with low calories snacks like carrots, celery, bananas.

I dropped 15 lbs fairly fast.

> Also Deleting junk food, sodas , and beer completely from my pantry.

So you improved the quality of your diet significantly. That is very different from just eating fewer calories. I suspect that if you had not done this it would have worked.

> Replacing them with low calories snacks like carrots, celery, bananas.

Also improving your fibre intake, and other improvements in nutrition too.

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