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Comment by beachstartup | Hacker News Reader

that guy is a troll. he's literally repeating the same useless thing over again. everyone knows how simple it is to lose weight, the problem is the difficulty with people who have a physiological and psychological problem of overeating. that's the thing he doesn't address at all and is the actual problem today.

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He's not a troll, he simply correcting people's misunderstandings.

If you eat fewer calories than you burn will you loss weight? Yes, of course.

Do people have trouble sticking to calorie deficient diets? Yes, that's why so many people are fat.

Very few people even bother to track calories. Some people do have trouble sticking with it, but for most, the eureka moment happens sometime in the first week when they realize that they are consuming far more calories than they had believed. It's not a problem of perseverance when most people aren't even bothering to get started.

That's a fair point. A lot of people track calories and fail at doing it well enough to loss weight, while others never actually try.

Calorie logging is actually probably the best solution to the psychological problem. Your stomach is saying to your brain that it is hungry and that you must eat. Sometimes you might be so hungry that you feel you are actually hurting yourself. But if you have been logging your calories and macronutrients, your brain knows that you will be okay. You're not gonna die even if your stomach says that you will. It's a triumph of cognition over biology.

How about fixing the physiological problem that is telling you you are hungry? If you are feeling hungry all the time, it is because you are leptin resistant. People become leptin resistant in an insulin-flooded environment. Solution: restore leptin sensitivity by stopping the flow of insulin. You stop the flow of insulin by reducing carbs (and possibly protein). You maintain leptin sensitivity using intermittent fasting (if you have iron will-power, you could use this as a starting point, but that sounds miserable to me).

Note that this physiological state (leptin resistance) is likely an evolutionary survival advantage as people would be insulin-flooded when eating fruit in the late summer and early fall, just as packing on weight for winter would be most advantageous. Since we never have the proverbial winter to lose the weight and restore leptin sensitivity, we are left starving and eating more all of the time.

People don't get fat because they are eating too many calories. People are eating too much because, physiologically, they are getting fat. Hormones drive the behavior.

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