The Harajuku Moment (2024) | Hacker News Reader

The Harajuku Moment (2024)

tim.blog

86 pointsabhaynayar58 comments

This isn't an account of the cultural moment that indi-fashion hub Harajuku had before its gentrification by Major international brand stores, or a inane J-Travel blog complaining about being out of shape and there being too much walking, It's a possibly interesting story of personal growth only coincidentally related to Harajuku.

I didn't know what Harajuku was, and thought it was going to be some Japanese term for some psychological concept, like ikigai, kaizen, wabi-sabi, or something like that.

Disappointingly, it's about personal shrinkage - weight loss. Yes, you have to want to do it; people fail because they get hungry, and that can be surprisingly hard to fight. The magic GLP drugs work because they suppress hunger, at which point not eating becomes easier.

Took a really long time to get to that point.

This is how Tim Ferriss writes, unfortunately. I think he thinks that doing this is a "hack" that drives engagement.

Perhaps. But these days it reads like AI slop.

ChatGPT literally sounds like it was trained on these influencer bro thought leaders.

"I would not recommend that.

Because that is bad.

Tom tried it. Dick tried it. Harry tried it.

Tom lost everything. Dick lost his dick. Harry's wife left him.

But there is one situation where this might apply, and when I would recommend it.

That is, if you would like to buy a used diaper factory."

I see this a lot of these meandering essays or whatever from thought leader types: write a lot of fluff about a subject and make it sound like you're the first person to have a thought on said subject.

I’m thankful to have learned how to skim and scan.

Nah. You close the tab and move on with life.

> Again, trying to literally count calories sucks and is demotivating. Setting up a rigid template for a week and then using it as a basic guide is sustainable and fun.

I lost a huge amount of weight when I was younger (From above 100 kg to 60 kg). I then added 15 kg back slowly, about 1 kg a month, while working out.

The most important thing I learned is that motivation is worth approximately nothing. It comes and it goes. It eventually becomes a job in itself to find it. If you base anything on it being fun and you being motivated, you'll fail.

What's free and sustainable is discipline. You don't weight and log your food because it's motivating and fun, you just do it. It's like brushing your teeth, it's something you have done for so long that it'd feel weird not to.

I don't think I've enjoyed squatting once in the last two years. I dread any session that involves squatting, but if it's gym day, I go to the gym, and if it's squat day, then I squat.

I think a lot of what people call failures of discipline actually comes from not having the tools they need. Someone who lives 15 miles away from the nearest gym will have a tougher time than someone who's gym is next door.

I've learned to hate, and almost feel like I've unlearned the meaning of, the word discipline. I'm not even sure it really exists. One may feel they accomplished something through discipline, but why did they have the discipline to do so? Why did they have the discipline but not someone else in a similar situation? Did they actually create it in themselves, or was it just always there?

Discipline, commonly, seems to just mean "doing it even if you don't feel like doing it". If you get yourself to do something when you don't want to do it, you've basically gotten yourself to want to do it at some level. How is that meaningfully different from motivation, or some other intrinsic force? The thought tends to bring me to thinking about free will, but that's getting away from the topic.

Instead, everything feels more like routines and setting up your environment for successfully doing the routines you want to have. Construct the environment, and the routine follows. Maybe for some people counting calories makes them less likely to follow through with a diet, so instead they should only stock healthy foods that they won't over eat. For some people it may be the opposite. Or as you say, live closer to the gym to increase the odds you'll actually go.

It depends on if you think how you feel when doing something is a meaningful difference or not I guess.

> and was amazed at how many calories I would have to eat in order to stay the same weight. It was huge.

Can someone explain this to me? I try to stay under 2000 calories. To me it means eating almost nothing. Let's say I have berries and yogurt. That ~300. Add a morning latte (no sugar). Now we're at 500. I've effectively had a tiny breakfast and already spent 1/4th of my calorie budget.

Taking what I just ate and multiplying by 1.5 x 2 meals are two more tiny meals and I've hit my limit. And that's no snacks and avoiding all sugar

The only way to make it lots is to eat heaps of veggies with no dressing / oil.

By eating different foods. I frequently get filling bento boxes in japan that are ~500-600 calories. And drinking when is extremely counterintuitive when trying to maintain/lose weight.

Which ones are those? Every time I ride the Shinkansen I get a bento. I go look at the station and outside in the depachika, they are all labelled. 19 of 20 of them are over 1000 calories, most much higher. The few that aren't are tiny and bland looking.

I have one maybe one and a half meals per day which works great for me. I don’t think that works for everyone. I basically don’t eat anything from after dinner to lunch. I’m not explicitly doing IF or anything, it’s just an eating pattern I’ve settled on over the last couple of years and matches what we sort of did in our hunter gatherer phase.

I also have a sour-spicy tooth instead of a sweet tooth which means I’m naturally driven to snacks that are not calorie heavy.

Note that the specified BMR is 2,900 in this article. If you are a heavier individual you tend to have a higher BMR.

A latte with semi-skimmed milk is closer to 100 (probably 125ish) than 200 calories in your example. A low fat greek yoghurt can be as low as 50 calories per 100g, so the 300 calories examples gives you 600 grams of yoghurt, quite a large portion.

The best way to hit a deficit though isn't to eat very little, its to eat satiating and/or high-volume food and add a small amount of exercise. For example potatoes will generally fill you up quicker than rice, pasta or bread for the same calories.

Also, BMR is not how much you need to eat, it's what you'd burn if you were effectively in a coma. RMR (resting metabolic rate) is what you'd burn if you were as lazy as humanly possible (one can dream), often 1.15xBMR, and actual output is typically 1.2xBMR for an extremely sedentary person.

Practically speaking if you do things with your life, like deliberate exercise, it'll be more like 1.3xBMR or more. Which means 3770 for a BMR of 2900 - a ton of food if you're not eating calorie dense things like e.g. ice cream.

If you were to eat, say, 1000 calories, and maintain activity levels (most people can't), youd be losing the better part of a pound of mass a day, and close to 50/50 muscle and fat.

I personally skip breakfast and just eat lunch and dinner.

I'm not very active, and I've found that doing that as well as not eating snacks, sugar, or having calories in drinks makes it pretty easy to roughly be calorically neutral day to day.

Wonder what you need that latte for if you’re minding calorie intake. Black coffee is pretty easy to get used to and holds close to zero if not zero.

>Can someone explain this to me? I try to stay under 2000 calories. To me it means eating almost nothing.

2000 is "almost nothing"? What are you used to eating? Is it regular natural food or food industry crap loaded with sugar and calories? Here's two examples of eating througout the day:

- 1 cup Greek yogurt + 3/4 cup berries (~230 kcal)

- 10.5 oz salmon + 5 oz baby potatoes + 5 spears asparagus (~750 kcal)

- 1 banana (~105 kcal)

- 7 oz grilled chicken breast + 3/4 cup cooked rice + - 2 cups vegetables (~585 kcal)

- 1 oz mixed nuts + 1 apple (~280 kcal)

- 1 cup Greek yogurt + 3/4 cup berries (~230 kcal)

10.5 oz ribeye steak + 5 oz baby potatoes + 5 spears asparagus (~1,000 kcal)

- 1 apple (~95 kcal)

- 7 oz grilled chicken breast + 3/4 cup cooked rice + 2 cups vegetables (~585 kcal)

- 1 oz mixed nuts (~175 kcal)

Both are around ~2000Kcal. Are these "almost nothing"?

>Let's say I have berries and yogurt. That ~300. Add a morning latte (no sugar). Now we're at 500. I've effectively had a tiny breakfast and already spent 1/4th of my calorie budget.

Make the latte into a black and it's 0 calories. But even with latte, you consume 1/4 of daily calories, in one of the 4 (3 + snack) meal of the day. Sounds about right.

This isn't enough for me as 82kg mid 30s man. I will lean out by 3-5 kilos and lose strength for lifting weights.

What fats do you put on your potatoes + asparagus + vegetables, plus cooking fats for the meats? No idea how many cals "enough olive oil to lubricate" is. I consciously use cooking fats to creep in more healthy calories to sustain me.

You have to accept that losing weight and gaining strength are generally antagonistic goals. You won't hit personal bests, you may even see the numbers go down, but as long as you have adequate protein intake and enough stimulus, your muscle mass should mostly be preserved, and what little you lost will be back as soon as you're back to eating at maintenance or at a light surplus.

>This isn't enough for me as 82kg mid 30s man.

Enough for what? For losing weight, as a 82kg/mid 30s they're fine. In fact, you can live forever (and live longer that on higher calories) on those.

And you don't need to lose that much to begin with if you're at 82kg and like 5' 8"+ anyway. Perhaps your "ideal" weight is like 70kg or so, but if you're average height and 82kg and active, no real need to hit that for general health.

>What fats do you put on your potatoes + asparagus + vegetables, plus cooking fats for the meats?

Spray some EVOO a few times. A few sprays (less than 1 tbsp total).

The bit preceding this quote is pretty relevant to the discussion, specifically about BMR and generally making the right decisions using a data driven approach.

You try to stay under 2000 calories. Why? Is this number backed with data and helping drive you towards a specific goal?

Consider that the author's BMR might have been higher than you think.

2000kcal is about 1.5kg of chicken breasts, or 2.3kg of potatoes. Vegetables are broadly not worth counting, as you likely won't be able to eat enough to make a difference.

That's a huge amount of food.

> avoiding all sugar

I don't think you understand macros if you think a breakfast of yogurt, berries, and milk is avoiding sugar. Berries are mostly sugar, and lactose is a sugar which makes up a significant portion of yogurt and milk's calories. Your breakfast is close to 50% sugar. I would hate to see what the macros look like when you're not "avoiding all sugar".

Also 150 calories of whole milk is 8 fl oz. How big is your morning latte? Milk is a great food for bodybuilding, because it's easy to consume a bunch of calories without feeling that full. This makes it less good when you're trying to lose weight.

2000 calories is also a laughable threshold. Is anyone saying that a 4'9" needs equal amount of energy to a 6'8"?

I think you're inflating your calorie count a bit: 200 calories of whole milk is like a 20 oz latte. 300 calories of yogurt and berries is like 12 oz of greek yogurt and a cup of berries. I'm not sure putting 1.5 lbs of stuff in your stomach for breakfast really counts as a small breakfast.

My weight loss diet is coffee for breakfast and lunch, then one large pizza for dinner. That's it.

You’re only tracking one of the variables.

It’s the deficit that matters - the intake is not enough info.

I think there's some evidence for this, and it's consistent with my experiences with myself and what I've seen in others.

It's basically the idea behind the motivation to change literature, that there has to be some point at which the person has to be on board and interested in the change. It may be the desire to change isn't a discrete thing, that something builds over time, and we just become conscious of it at a particular time, or only remember certain moments, or whatever.

There has to be an opportunity though as well, which is another point people get tripped up on and why they lose motivation. Even if someone wants to change, if they don't perceive it as being possible for whatever reason, correctly or incorrectly, the desire for change doesn't have an outlet. It may rise to consciousness and then be immediately quashed because there's nowhere to go.

A lot of the time I think that's the bigger obstacle; it's not being aware of some desire to change, it's having some sense that the change isn't possible or that they don't know how to go about it, which amounts to the same thing.

On the tracking point: I’ve found that a coding agent that can modify a file system (create and update CSVs) that’s accessible on both my laptop and phone to be the single best way to track things I’ve ever used. Bar none.

Even apps with the best UX, like Strong for tracking workouts, feel exponentially clunkier than having an agent that can answer questions, analyze pictures, and write things down on a persistent file in real-time.

Makes sense. Would you care to elaborate on your agent setup?

I actually built my own daily driver at https://operator.io.

There's definite tradeoffs when it comes using a remote agent service vs. setting up OpenClaw or Hermes on a Mac Mini, but being able to access an agent with a completely isolated file system and network gives me peace of mind when I'm using it.

When I start exercising and tracking how many calories I burn, I realize how hard it is to outrun your diet. Thinking, "This cookie would cost me 35 minutes on the treadmill," is a huge deterrent.

When I stop working out, I quickly forget what calories actually cost.

Totally this. I've recently embarked on a weight loss/fitness journey (coming up on 50 rotations around the sun) and I find it incredibly helpful to think of the 250 calorie chocolate bar as roughly 25 minutes on the treadmill.

Burning a thousand calories an hour on a treadmill is kind of high, isn't it? Like, you'd have to be pushing really hard for the entire hour to hit a thousand calories, wouldn't you?

Brief search says us male is 200lb on avg, 200lb male burns just over 1000 in an hour at 8mph, average adult 10 mile is 1:17. Soo, 8 miles in an hour is 7:30 miles...10 in 1:17 is 7:42.

Closer than I thought, I suppose, but definitely requires above average pace (where the average is times recorded by runninglevel.com)

250 in 25 minutes is 600/hour, not 1000/hour.

You are correct. I blame sixty minute hours.

but that is also discouraging. For example, I just ran for 30 mins, but that only gives me half a cookie. Why the f do I even run?

Run because cardiac health and general fitness are important. Manage calorie intake if your only goal is weight loss

+1 - Exercise gives the benefit of calories expended for weight loss, but it really isn't enough to matter for the average person. Exercise is great for improving your cardiovascular function, your muscles, your neurological pathways (could be butchering the terminology) for those movements, and it often leads you towards other good things, like spending time with others and getting outside.

Sure, but if you're trying to manage your weight it helps you to decide whether that cookie is worth it or not. If it's an Oreo cookie (or 3), I'll pass. If it's my wife's home made chocolate chip cookie I'll eat it (but not 2). It's a useful calibration for effort vs reward as opposed to eating a couple cookies without thinking about it.

Ancient Greek philosophy on mind-body developmental balance can help. A physically fit human with no intellectual development and a propensity to follow orders might be the fascist reinterpretation of the classical Spartan ideal, but this would have been viewed as unbalanced aberration. Similarly, producing geeky nerds who can rearrange complicated equations in their head with ease but who can’t run a mile or lift heavy objects is just as undesirable.

This is a historically valid concept, not a convenient utilitarian fiction for the indoctrination of the youth into proper behavior. The idea was that γυμναστική (gymnastikē) and μουσική (mousikē) should be balanced for optimal human outcomes.

Plato’s Republic:

> “Those who devote themselves exclusively to gymnastic become more savage than they ought to be, while those who devote themselves to the other arts become softer than is good for them… The former, if they had no contact with the Muses, become filled with brute force and a mindless boldness; the latter, if they have no training in gymnastic, become cowardly and feeble in soul.”

When I was a kid there was a strong "nerd/jock" dichotomy. But now, according to my own kid, there isn't any such thing. I view this as good.

I see this post is from 2024. Maybe I would have enjoyed the hook and enjoyed reading along to figure out what this "harajuku moment" was back in 2024. But since being exposed to AI slop daily, and having to scan through so much verbose AI outputs during day-to-day "coding", I've now started skimming so much that I got annoyed that it meandered, then just couldn't bother reading the rest of the post after I've figured out what the harajuku moment is.

It's like my brain is responding to blog posts now in the same way that people scroll past tiktok videos in the first few seconds if there isn't enough of a dopamine hit.

I used to enjoy longform content... alas.

Doesn't help that he's a self-help author so he's always written like an LLM, even before LLMs.

> I used to enjoy longform content... alas.

Not all longform is like this, thankfully.

I'm of the opinion that for all the bad things AI has done for us and our psychology, there is a silver lining in that it has reduced our tolerance for "slop" and time-wasting tactics in general.

"Brevity is the sister of talent," said Chekov, and it applies to more than just creative writing.

> We all went down to Harajuku to see if we could see some artistically dressed youngsters

Over 95% of the people in Harajuku are tourists going there to do exactly that. Locals completely avoid the area.

Meh, you see all sorts. It's definitely much more touristed in the last decade. The heyday may have been late 90s and early 00s. See Fruits magazines and books. Certainly, "normal" Japanese avoid it, but they always have, just like Asakusa, Kabukicho, Roppongi etc.

https://archive.org/details/fresh-fruits/mode/2up

That said, you still see Medatsu (目立つ) and lots of younger people there looking for fashion, because that's where many of the (overpriced) used clothing stores are. There used to be more weird bands and such doing pop-up shows or playing at the Yoyogi band shell. Still, lots of Japanese tourists as well as foreigners, and lots of food events/festivals around there.

> apparently, 10 pounds of weight loss is roughly a clothing size [XL → L → M]

What? This is so wrong I'm confused how it could have possibly made it in. As a 5'7" guy, I was a M at 145, and still an M when I hit 175, though at that point I was close to an L. There is no way I was 3 separate sizes during that time

Something feels off / sloppy with the article in general and that’s gotta be the smoking gun. I cannot think of a single case where this is true, I’ve lost 35 pounds in the last 6 months, and I’m still a medium. 5’9”.

This rule of thumb, when used correctly, is supposed to refer to womens' dress straight sizes. As in, for an average height woman, losing 10 lbs is roughly equivalent to going from a size 8 to a size 6. It doesn't refer to clothing that is sized as "medium", "large", etc. (I did not read the article; it seems from the quote that the author was using this rule of thumb inappropriately and out of context.)

As Nike might say… Just do it.

Honestly, if you compare Tim's pre-GPT writing style, to his current stylometrics, you'll see a remarkably delta. It's as if he suddenly decided to change his established writing style and voice right when LLMs become widely available.

What a coincidence!

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