Comment by tpeng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpeng | Hacker News Reader

The stomach is not a good judge of whether you should be eating more or less food. For whatever reason, some individuals may be prone to overeating or undereating. If your natural eating tendencies have caused you to be over- or underweight, common sense says that you should stop listening to those natural urges.

The key to successful dieting is to transform eating from a biologically-mediated process into a cognitively-mediated process based on counting calories. Given this cognitive feedback, your stomach will actually adapt to a new calorie intake level, lessening hunger. Hunger can also be managed by eating more satiating foods and drinking water.

Caloric deficits (or surpluses) work like clockwork. The metabolic slowdown discussed in the article has marginal effects if any -- perhaps a couple hundred calories worth per day at most. A simple thought experiment shows us that the idea of a "set point" body weight is ludicrous: at starvation, of course, the body cannot possibly maintain weight.

The reasons why many people fail at dieting is that people underestimate the amount of effort/pain required:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18544_how-the-karate-kid-ruin...

"The metabolic slowdown discussed in the article has marginal effects if any -- perhaps a couple hundred calories worth per day."

I'm sorry, but that is not a marginal effect. That is the difference between weight gain and weight loss. Also, if you read the article you would have noticed that a calorie deficit is not the only thing that necessitates weight loss, in fact, it might not help at all. There are good calories and bad calories, and how your body handles each depends on the source of the calorie.

I recently went from bulking to cutting and went from 3500 calories per day to 2000 per day. You are massively underestimating caloric intake shifts that are possible or necessary.

You are assuming that the average person is a weight lifter like yourself. Most people aren't, most people get very little structured exercise.

The truth of the matter is that most people don't have the time to go throw 45's around a gym for an hour a few times a week, and that diet and metabolism are the two main factors in a persons weight.

Edit: Also, most people aren't eating 3500 calories a day. They are probably eating maybe a couple hundred calories more than they should, but the calories that they are consuming is causing insulin resistance which causes your fat stores to take up additional calories. Even cutting out the extra calories won't help once insulin resistance happens. And here's the kicker, not everyone's body will exhibit insulin resistance, that is why there are people that seem like they can eat what ever they want and not get fat.

Here's my anecdotal evidence, I used to eat whatever I wanted, though I ate mostly (what I thought to be) healthy, eg: oatmeal, fruit, veggies, etc. But I hurt my back and all of a sudden, despite my reduced caloric intake, the pounds started being put on. It wasn't until I discover HFLC diets, and began to do my own research that I realized it wasn't how much I was eating, but what I was eating that was causing the weight gain.

I haven't changed my exercise routine, so my total energy expenditure has not changed. Cutting calories is just as difficult for me as it is for anyone else

I am not sure how common insulin resistance is, but given that it is a metabolic disorder, I don't think you can draw general conclusions about metabolism from those individuals.

I never claimed that you did change your exercise routine but that has nothing to do with anything that I said. Again, most people don't have 1500 calories that they can cut from their diet. If they did cut that much, it is more likely to put their body in starvation mode, which is bad. For people that are overweight, what we want is the body to be in ketogenesis, that is, breaking down fat in order to provide calories.

Also insulin resistance is the precursor to diabetes, considering that America is currently suffering from rising levels of diabetes, I am comfortable saying that insulin resistance is fairly common (as in, you know someone that is insulin resistant).

How many extra calories does ketosis burn? I've read that it's only about 300 per day.

Again - I suspect that most low carb diets work because you're eating less calories. Mainly because people don't realise how many calories there are in carbohydrates.

“most people don't have the time to go throw 45's around a gym for an hour a few times a week”

“For people that are overweight, what we want “

“cutting out the extra calories won't help once insulin resistance happens.”

It sounds like you are overweight, sedentary, and insulin-resistant.

I mean this in all sincerity and without any mean spirit:

Please find a way to get healthy. If what you are doing is working, great. If not, reconsider your approach. Please do not give nutrition advice to others until you are actually healthy.

200 calories a day equates to one pound loss every 16 days, but to reach that level of metabolic slowdown, you need to be thin, and you need to cut your caloric intake down by about 1000 calories a day.

So yeah - it's a marginal effect.

I was also being quite generous in that 200 estimate. While many people do anecdotally report that their maintenance level seems to be lower when cutting, I suspect that it's largely due to changes in physical activity as individuals are more easily exhausted on caloric deficits.

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