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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

You have the completely wrong take on this. Dieting destroys your relationship with food. Basically every adult woman exhibits some level of disordered eating because of it— "girl dinner" is both funny because it's true and sad.

Being able to lose weight while continuing to eat is a wonderful thing. There is no virtue in spending your willpower making your body do something it desperately doesn't want to do. That's some puritan shit.

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Normally dieting shouldn't be necessary to maintain healthy weight though? One could eat a whole lot of salad (with some serious dressing) and a piece of meat and even a little starchy side (some potatoes or similar) 3 times a day and not gain weight. Throw in some regular moderate exercise and you're golden.

Granted, once you go past middle age, it can become a bit more complicated.

Someone brought up doughnuts as an example, but that's a ridiculous source of calories: I could probably down half a dozen doughnuts (a daily calorie budget) and then go for a normal meal afterwards.

Eating only becomes disordered if one can't be bothered to eat healthy food as a rule and then freaks out about weight gain as a result.

>Basically every adult woman exhibits some level of disordered eating because of it— "girl dinner" is both funny because it's true and sad

This is sexist and absolutely not true, there are plenty of women capable of pre-planning what they're going to eat and sticking with it. It's not "dieting", it's living a healthy lifestyle and not regularly eating junk.

My dude, I'm a woman talking about my experience with myself and other women. Disordered eating is rampant. It's ingrained to the very core of how women are taught to approach food. Denying food and starving yourself is the default behavior.

We are human animals. Our bodies need healthy food and regular exercise. There’s a case that diet and exercise are worth willpower capacity, possibly more so than anything else. That’s just the reality we exist in?

Capitalism disagrees. I need you to work two extra hours today. Also watch this advertisement for Tasty Snack! We've spend a billion dollars of research to ensure you eat this nibblet filled with 350% your daily sugar requirement, 200% of your daily fat intake, and 3000% of your recommended salt. Remember all the beautiful people in the world are eating Tasty Snack! Sold in the impulse buy isle near you.

It doesn't make you magically lose weight, it just gets you closer to "girl dinnering" with less cognitive load. The weight loss comes from eating less.

The difference is that it puts you in control of your hunger and what/how much you eat. You don't build negative associations with food while you're running a deficit. You don't build the association "hunger/misery means you're doing good and losing weight."

Yeah, it's funny, Ozempic sounds utterly useless for me. I know how to lose weight, it's dealing with the side effects of weight loss that is tricky. And the side effects of weight loss sound a lot like the side effects of Ozempic.

There is absolutely virtue in spending willpower to make your body do something it doesn’t want to do - maintaining and developing self control and autonomy. Imagine if there was no way to develop self-discipline, you’d be at the whims of your environment and the world would be nothing but chaos.

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