Comment by leidenfrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leidenfrost | Hacker News Reader

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But it's not.

What you're referring to, is the basic concept of thermodynamic calorie in/calorie out. Yes, you can "just" reduce food and lose weight if you hit deficit numbers.

But if you don't do it correctly, you'll feel like trash, you'll suffer bad cravings, and put yourself in a stressful mental situation for days, possibly putting your job at risk.

You have to:

- Eat less than what you're already eating

- But enough to nourish yourself so you keep being in good shape for your work and hobbies

- Manage hunger

- Make the change sustainable so you can keep doing it for the rest of your life.

It's specially hard when your work is entirely sedentary, you live alone and, ironically, when you have a salary that let's you order food every day.

A lot of people don't have it hard. Maybe because they have someone cooking for them at home, because they meal prep the entire week, or because their work is so physically intensive they can just wing it and burn everything with what they need to do for a living anyway.

Inaccurate in my opinion. Let's say you eat 2500 calories a day usually. But you want to lose weight so you reduce it to 1800.

Except your calories are from pop tarts.

If you ate 100 calories of pop tarts every hour you're awake for total of 1800 calories... At the end of the month you'd be fatter.

If you ate 1800 calories of pop tarts once a day in 1 hour, you might maintain weight or loose a little. Maybe.

If you had 3600 calories of pop tarts in a few hour window, and then didn't eat again for 48 hours, you'd lose weight in a month.

Insulin control is 99% of losing weight. Yes thermodynamic blah blah, but unless you pay attention to hormone control that controls metabolism in general, it's not going to work without insane willpower to keep your 'calories out' higher than your body wants.

If you repeated the 3600 calories every 48 hours with beef instead, you'd lose weight like never before.

> If you ate 100 calories of pop tarts every hour you're awake for total of 1800 calories... At the end of the month you'd be fatter.

This is thermodynamically impossible unless your daily calorie use is less then 1800 calories.

Are you saying raising your insulin levels hourly, 18 times a day, will not do anything to your metabolism? Did you even read my post, or did you just instantly reply with the same pedantic reply which my post was specifically meant to address?

> Are you saying raising your insulin levels hourly, 18 times a day, will not do anything to your metabolism?

What metabolic effect do you expect from raising your insulin levels hourly?

It is only thermodynamically impossible if you assume 100% efficiency in energy extraction from food, but in practice we only extract a very small amount of energy from matter. Thermodynamically you could extract ~10^12 kcal from a Pop Tart if you converted its mass into energy.

Not that I agree that for a human metabolism meal timing makes much of a difference in energy extraction, but it wouldn't be thermodynamically impossible.

It's insane to me that people keep talking about the energy in part. Forget that.

Realize that WHAT you put in can change what energy out is.

If I gave you 1800 calories of vodka at 8am, would your use the same amount of energy during the day, and even make it to your 7pm gym? No.

Ok, well sugar isnt exactly the same obviously, but it can also affect what you do that day, how your body acts, your brain even.

Your energy out gets totally messed with after you have tons of alcohol for obvious reasons. Something similar happens on sugar/spiked insulin levels. Can you willpower through it and increase your energy out by running til you drop dead and lose weight? Sure. But it's not easy.

What's way easier is not having the insulin spike in the first place.

Yes it can affect what you do. That's the calories out part of the equation.

Nobody claims that the quality of what you eat has no effect on you, but every study shows that if you maintain the same calorie intake and expenditure it doesn't really matter how you consume the calories or how you expend it.

Well then luckily that shows you hopefully how bad studies are. Because I assume that you agree that eating 100 calories of Pop-Tarts per hour for 18 hours for 30 days, would give you a different result than eating 3 days worth of Pop-Tarts in a few hours once every 3 days for a month.

To not understand that would mean that while believing some studies, you completely ignore all the studies that have been done on insulin and weight gain.

> Because I assume that you agree that eating 100 calories of Pop-Tarts per hour for 18 hours for 30 days, would give you a different result than eating 3 days worth of Pop-Tarts in a few hours once every 3 days for a month.

I agree that you would feel very differently in those situations and it's likely you wouldn't spend the same amount of energy unless you really make an effort to do it.

I don't agree that if you do make an effort to spend the same amount of energy you would have different results with regards to weight loss.

Two weird assumptions here...1, that massive amounts of constant blood sugar/insulin don't affect metabolism.

2, that in the face of crazy long term insulin/hormone disruption, people will continue to be just as active as if they had a sane diet of mostly meat and vegetables.

I'm starting to see why everyone is so unhealthy.

Insulin control is about managing hunger more than a direct cause for weight.

You don't even need to do keto or wacky "just meat" diets to handle insulin. Protein consumption prevents insulin spikes for around 1-2 hours after eating. Also, proteins and fats slow down digestion.

Turns out, the good old Mediterranean diet is spot-on for a healthy lifestyle.

? Insulin is not about management of hunger. I think you got your hormones mixed up.

But yes, meat and vegetables is basically what I'd recommend. Never pasta or bread or sugar unless you need help gaining weight.

Meat and vegetables would make me sedentary from having inadequate glycogen for physical work and exercise.

How about: some pasta and bread to enable physical exertion.

I know a guy that has had meat only for 3 years now. Most fit guy I know.

My father and I have avoided carbs for a few years now. Can do home renovations, gardening, dirt bike riding, and hikes better than we ever did eating carbs. Unless you're doing long distance hikes/running/hard core sports, I really don't think that's true.

He’s probably thinking of ghrelin (or NPY), but leptin and insulin both act as satiety signals too, although weaker than the hunger signal.

The first law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems, which your body is not. Yes it is true that, very broadly speaking, eating more results in weight gain past a certain point. But first principles are not the most proximate reason for that by a long shot.

That's exactly why I liked being on keto. Never felt hungry, had way more energy, mental health improved a lot. No other diet had those effects. I've been off it for a while and I feel gross again.

You can fill yourself up with lower calorie food too. Most people don’t eat enough vegetables. They basically take up space in the gut, make you feel full, while you get your 5 calories from an entire bowl of lettuce or whatever.

> Eat less than what you're already eating

Not true for most people. You need to eat fewer calories, not less food. I counted calories for a few weeks an was very surprised.

Right, so exactly like I said, it's very simple. If you want to lose weight, reduce calories.

If you add extra modifiers like "I want to feel great while doing it" and "I want to lose weight while sedentary" and "I want to continue eating whatever stupid thing I want" and "I need to be able to scroll tiktok for at least 3 hours, leaving no time for cooking", it gets much more complicated.

Side note: LOL at "but if you're craving food you might get fired!!1!" - this is professional victimhood at its finest.

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