Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

In general there are three things you need to balance if you want to get fit, loose weight or get good at a sport or similar: eating, resting and training. Most make the mistake and think that the training is the most important thing, but it's really not. You cannot eat bad and train good and think that it will balance itself out, you really are what you eat.

Something I'm really annoyed at in today's society is the focus on calories. Sure calories are all which matter... If all you want to do is warm water. But then you're ignoring the effect on your hunger and your hormones which can lead to yo-yo dieting.

In theory it can work, if you can live with constantly being hungry. But in a war against hunger, you're bound to loose.

Aim for quality, not quantity, and let your built in weight control device - the hunger - take care of the rest.

After that you can focus on your training regime. Here again I totally agree with the article. Training should be fun and rewarding and if you can manage get a good feedback loop you're golden.

Can you define what "eating bad" means?

Nothing precise really, but I would say a lot of sugar (candy and soda) would be bad. Vegetables would be good. Avoiding fast foods and sugar will go a long way I'd say.

But other than that I'm really not sure, there are a lot of different (often conflicting) ideas of what is "good" and what is "bad".

Fat is bad vs Fat is good. Calories matter, the rest don't vs Calories are different. etc.

Eating a varied diet of real whole foods and staying away from processed, packaged food is the general consensus for a "good" diet.

General consensuses are not always right.

Whole grains, legumes, olive oil, lean meat, fresh vegetables. Foods that are nutritionally dense. Avoid saturated fats, fried food, starches.

why avoid saturated fats? because they cause heart disease?

Simple sugars above all else; when in doubt, eat more vegetables.

For more, see Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It by Taubes.

There's so many opinions on that it's extremely hard to get a clear picture. The "optimal" diet currently in vogue seems to be a sort of squirrel diet consisting of soy milk, legumes, nuts, whole grainS, chicken and vegetables while cow milk, red meat, potatoes, sugar and salt is the spawn of the devil.

In a more moderate sense (i.e. My own biased opinion) "eating bad" is what everybody knows deep down: excess of candy, ice cream, soft drinks, fast food or the tendency to over-eat i.e. All-you-can-eat places and too big dinner plates at home :)

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