There seems to be a pervasive unwillingness to understand the nature of positive feedback cycles, and instead we're just continually hearing "fat because of intake" and "intake because of fat" arguments that try to fall on an extreme interpretation of simplified causality.
This article belongs to the very few that actually do a job of describing a feedback cycle, but then it falls short and does the popular simplification thing.
Fat cells emit hormones that cause hunger, and they actually do require energy for upkeep. The body prioritizes not losing any of its substance, so most "healthy" adults will always at least eat the amount they need to not lose weight. On top of that come fatal breakages in the messaging system the body uses to control the flow of energy. Fat people are prone to insulin resistance, physical extension of their digestive system that leads to the urge for more throughput, and other mechanisms - all of which cause an almost insurmountable desire to eat a lot.
It's an addiction that subverts two of our most powerful mental priorities: the reward/pleasure system and the survival instinct. In most people there is not a lot that can be done to overcome what these two systems tell you. That's why diets fail: my body is lying to me. It's like getting two popup alert boxes every minute, one saying "you are DYING! eat something" and the other goes "you're unhappy, eat something, you deserve some happiness".
I really did enjoy this article. I don't think there is anything new here, but it's presented in a very "mass media friendly" way, which is important for finally defeating the "just eat less" mentality.
Of course, it is still calorie in, calorie out, but we need to understand what effects metabolic changes in our body if we want to understand what calories are going out. Furthermore, quality of life generally indicates most people don't want to shut their metabolism down even if it did mean weight loss -- we want to be energy using machines that are motivated to "get up and do stuff", so just blindly reducing calories is not the path to that.
Calorie counting is an important part, but knowing what macro-nutrients ratio is just as important. More protein, more fat, more fiber, less carbs will help that a lot. Why is calorie tracking still so important? because fat takes forever to metabolize and is denser than carbs, so (a) You will need to break the psychological programming of expecting food to provide instant fuel, fat will take an hour(ish) to energize you; if you just are "still hungry" and eat more in 30 minutes you're losing the battle. (b) Most of us are used to eating a volume of food that equates to the calories we want from carbs. Eating that much in fat will obviously not help weight loss goals, so when eating fat dense foods we must eat much smaller portions.
There are really two separate feedback loops we use to feel sated. Fat is good
I think maybe I wasn't clear. Normally when you eat, you expect to not feel hungry any more. In particular, if you are targeting a calorie deficit or weight loss you look forward to that "joy of food" sensation, a big part of which is the glucose that absorbs almost instantly and raises your blood sugar, and more of which absorbs over time beginning immediately. If you are on a low carb meal you will miss that feeling entirely. You won't feel from fat (though you will if you have plenty of protein and fibe) and you won't have the blood pressure spike that most of us associate with "food good" (note I don't mean the extreme spike you would get from eating pure sugar necessarily, just any higher than baseline peaking).
So the psychological programming is getting used to not expecting that spike (and possibly that 'full' feeling), and still feeling you sated your self.
Its not the type of food really thats the problem, it's processed foods and "low fat" diets.
Processed carbs are easily digest and throw up your blood sugar levels. Insulin is released to counter this, which converts it into body fat. Raw "veggies" are better than smoothies because typically sugar is thrown in with it. Eating an apple is much healthier for you then drinking concentrated apple juice.
The "low fat" diets are also a problem because to substitute the fat they add carbs, usually processed carbs. Keto diets limit the carb intake to about 80g per day and typically people on that diet feel more energy because the body is burning fat for fuel but importantly they are not in energy saving mode.
The fiber in the salad will of course help you with the full feeling. Many vegetables are chock full of carbohydrates, so it depends on your goals. If that's the only source of carbohydrates you are probably doing great, if it adds on top of bread and breakfast cereal and some noodles, etc, then the veggies are just adding more carbs.
I'm not sure I agree that this article falls short and does the popular simplification thing. It's the first widely accessible article I've seen that clearly refutes (with data and a citation) the oft-repeated assertion that "a calorie is a calorie".
Because the science is still incomplete, the article unsurprisingly ends on a "more research is needed" note, but I completely agree with that!
While your point about fat cells, ghrelin and leptin has some factual basis, precisely how these hormones affect eating patterns and are themselves affected by bodyfat, carbohydrate intake and insulin resistance, are among the things that need more carefully controlled studies.
I'd also like to see more science into the effects of intermittent fasting. There is IIRC only one actual study on this, far from enough to back up all the various protocols and broscience articles on how "fasting is good for you". Anecdotally, it seems to be very effective for some people but I don't think we yet have a very good understanding of why that is, or indeed whether it is even true under controlled conditions.
I personally suspect that carb restriction and intermittent fasting both have very similar effects on this group of 3 hormones, while sugar has basically the opposite effect. What's lacking however is clear scientific evidence of this.
Our bodies have what the engineer in me might call a "control system" for blood sugar. When you're talking about control systems in engineering you look at the step response and that's what tells you everything you need to know. You have a "plant" which is the thing you're controlling and you have the "control system" which is the thing that provides negative feedback and thus controls the "plant".
If the control system responds faster than the plant you've got a decent shot at keeping things under control and your system is said to be critically damped or overdamped. Both of these are pretty acceptable solutions for process control. If your system doesn't respond fast enough, it's said to be underdamped and shit is real bad. We're talking the kind of runaway shit that you see in the Tacoma Narrows bridge video. Here's a nice picture of various control systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Second_order_transfer_func...
Our bodies have a control system for hunger, I'm sure of that. But we don't get to choose how fast that control system reacts; that's fixed. For a lot of foods, our control system responds faster than our blood sugar and things are fine. But some foods can cause our blood sugar to go up faster than we can store it or otherwise react to it. Then eventually enough insulin gets dumped into the blood stream that blood sugar starts to crash. So then you get really hungry and start eating again. The more you eat large amounts of easily digestible sugars, the further you go from the critical damping of (zeta = 1) to horrifically underdamped (zeta = 0).
I wonder when the engineers and the scientists are going to get together and hammer this stuff out formally.
Care to also post links to scientific evidence next to the reddit? Sure it has information, but from a quick glance it's information without much science/proof to back it up, from people who are already convinced. I think way more is needed to convince the rather critical spirits on HN :)
AFAIK, there are several experimental results supporting low carb diets, but all are refutable, as in someone can always come up with a counter-argument. Robert Lustig and his "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" lecture (available on youtube) is probably currently the best-supported argument.
There's an initiative called the "Nutrition Science Initiative" (nusi.org) that apparently attempts to put an end to the debate with irrefutable research, which will finally convince everyone one way or the other. They seem to be still in the early stages.
ultra-low to no carb on a daily basis has severe issues with it as well. Things like carb-cycling, or low (but not ultra-low) attempt to address those issues.
The main points being (1) brain needs glucose, can't fuel any other way (2) glucose is needed for maximum muscle response so if you are fit/athletic in any way you can be short-changing your performance if you have no glycogen stores to tap for "burst fuel"
Not so: the brain can be fueled by ketone bodies, which the liver can create from fat.
P.S. I agree with your larger point that avoiding all carbs for many days at a time should only be done by people who have informed themselves of the risks (acidosis and kidney stones).
What did humans do before large numbers of carbs were widely available? Die of kidney stones? Or perhaps this is because modern people have become accustomed to them being available?
If you are "tapping for burst fuel" why are you worrying about your diet (apart from the sensible am I having good things enough worry...) Surely these diets are aimed at people who need to loose >10% of body weight ?
People who say "just eat less" aren't thinking like engineers. Engineers don't get to ignore the wrenches thrown into the works by reality. If seemingly simple advice fails for almost everyone, then the advice is flawed and someone thinking like an engineer has to figure out how to work around those flaws.
I don't know if low-carb diets are the full solution, but I think they're at least part of the solution. Avoiding carbs is a simple rule that let's you avoid eating too many calories with relatively less effort than trying to stick to a low-calorie balanced diet. Its easy to blow through 200-300 calories of bagle without even a thought, not so much for an equivalent amount of bacon (6-7 slices).
The advice is sound. You get fat from the stuff that goes in your piehole. Stop putting so much stuff in there. The flaw is not in the argument. The flaw is in the people.
Reminds me of a story (no idea about historical accuracy): When the chief propagandist of the UDSSR was invited to a scientific conference he talked about all the positive effects of socialism, how it will solve all problems and so on. When his talk was finished the scientists unsurprisingly questioned him about his talk, because of all the prominent problems with socialism. His answer was simple:
"The system is perfect. The people are the problem."
If your system is 'perfect', but the people are the problem, maybe your system is shit. No one would use an engine that could go near the speed of light but killed all passengers in the process.
I don't know what sort of shitty engineers you hang out with. Blaming users is not an option for engineers who design cars or airplanes or buildings. If 75% of pilots push the wrong button, the pilots aren't shitty, your cockpit design is shitty.
I think it's more subtle than this in the case of dieting though. Is there even such a thing as a diet that can actually work for everyone?
I think there's certain axioms one has to accept when it comes to weight loss. First of which is to lose weight, you will feel hungry. There is no diet that can avoid this. Billions of years of evolution have worked to ensure that we feel hungry when we're losing weight.
Diets fail because humans are supposed to feel hungry when they're dieting. No matter what the constraints of the diet are, no matter how much they advertise "you can feel satisfied as long you stick with foods X, Y, and Z", your body cannot be tricked into thinking it's satiated when it's not.
At some point, trying to think of this from an engineering standpoint breaks down, because you're solving an intractable problem. Humans really are the issue here.
I think we need to redefine diets as not a list of foods to eat or rules to follow, but instead a state of mind you have to have. An acceptance that you'll feel hungry, but it's worth it to be healthy or look good. It's actually kind of obvious when you think about it.
It's factually correct, but completely useless as advice. It's someone saying "just do X" with a wave of their hand, without ever bothering to think about how to actually implement X.
If you read the article, you would have realized that calorie deficits do not necessitate weight loss, for a variety of reasons.
Thinking like an engineer, one should ask the question that is our underlying assumption, that is: is a calorie a calorie. The truth is, there are good calories and bad calories, and by eating good calories (fat, fiber, and protein) instead of bad calories (sugars and other non-fiber carbohydrates) you can lose weight.
Now if you are eating 1500 extra calories a day then your body burns, then switching diets is not the only answer, but for most people this isn't the case.
> Now if you are eating 1500 extra calories a day then your body burns, then switching diets is not the only answer, but for most people this isn't the case.
The corollary of this is that if you're running a sufficient enough deficit, it doesn't matter how "bad" the calories are, thermodynamics plays the dominant role:
Saying that fat contains twice the calories as carbs ignores the plain fact that carbs contain a hell of a lot of calories.
This is the problem with modern eating. We don't realise how many calories there are in a slice of bread or a bowl of pasta.
Low carb works because people can't seem to understand that flour is 95% the energy density of sugar, and it's easier for them to trick themselves into calorie restriction by pretending that carbs are metabolised in a weird fat making way than it is for them to understand that wheat contains a lot of calories.
Also - people don't realise that after you've done all the calculations - eating an extra pound of fat will make you weigh roughly an extra pound.
Here's my diet advice:
If the thing you're eating is used in nature as an energy store, then it's probably packed with calories.
The article sets off alarm bells with me, because it places so much emphasis on slowing metabolisms at the beginning. As far as I'm aware, your metabolism doesn't slow down until you're close to starvation (all reserves used), and the reduction in energy output caused by the slowing metabolism is minor. Speed of metabolism seems to be something only people on the dodgy end of the weight loss spectrum believe in.
> As far as I'm aware, your metabolism doesn't slow down until you're close to starvation (all reserves used)
A bad night's sleep or a lack of sunlight will slow your metabolism down. It's quite variable. Under eating for just a couple days will tank it. Going low protein (under, say, 80 grams) is also sure to lower metabolism.
I've lost some weight recently by cutting my intake. My inspiration was my sister who used to be 5'2" and 260lbs but is now ~130lbs. She got her stomach stapled and for some number of months was on a 500 calorie a day diet. (I don't recommend that)
Anyway, seeing that and reading things here on HN about how calorie restriction has an order of magnitude more effect than exercise (which I do) I decided to try to eat ~1500 calories a day for a while.
It's surprisingly HARD because of how little food that is.
They way people eat in the USA, it's crazy how large the portions are. I'm in Japan where the portions are smaller but, calories are labeled on most things and even with small portions it's amazing to me just how little I can eat and stay under 2000 a day let alone 1500 a day.
A "small" Japanese convenience store style sandwich is 300 calories. Those are probably only 60% the size of the smallest sandwich I'd see in the USA. Pretty much any small Japanese pastry, donut, thing made with bread is 300-500 calories. Again those are at least 30% smaller than their USA counterparts.
Soda, Fruit juice, coffee with sugar, etc, all around 140 calories for 12oz.
Potato-chips or fries or a sugary snack? Forget about it!
The point is, it wasn't until I actually tried seriously looking at my calorie intake that I realized how many calories I was consuming. A small lunch, a medium dinner and a snack and I'm over 2000 calories easily. There's no way I could fit any kind of "normal" breakfast in that routine and still fit in 1500-2000 calories.
Anyway, I guess like I said that's kind of obvious but for whatever reason it wasn't to me until I actually started paying attention. As for being hungry all the time, yea, because of 48+ years of eating way too much my idea of what a meal should be or how much I should eat to feel like I've done more than just had a snack is seriously out of whack.
It's not about satiation for me. It's about quantity. My point was until I've eaten a plate of food where plate of food equals pretty much any "standard" picture of a plate of food (https://www.google.com/search?q=plate+of+food&tbm=isch) my brain thinks "Dang, you haven't really eaten yet" and yet pretty much every picture in that link is over >1000 calories.
Note, I'm not saying satiating foods wouldn't be better. Maybe I won't desire a snack later or maybe if I eat slow I'll stop earlier (unlikely). Rather, I'm saying many years of eating a plate of food, and possibly second helpings, has my mind thinking and looking forward to those quantities. As in "Oh Boy it's dinner time! Looking forward to that plate-o-food!" then "Awwwwwwww, that's all I can eat be under my limit. That's not even 1/2 a plate worth."
I do it but I don't like it because my mind/habit/experience/expectation is "meal = XXXX" not "meal = XX"
I recommend you read up on a bit and give it a try, in my experience once you get past the first few days it is MUCH easier than you would think. Also, I believe participating (or at least lurking) in a community, looking at progress pictures (and reading the stories behind them) provides a much needed psychological base to stand on for this task - as you've noted, you personally seem to have strong psychological hurdles.
Thanks. I'll give it try. And I'm not really having trouble. It just takes will power.
My point wasn't about my troubles. My point was, even if you came up with a pill that 100% satiated me, satiation is not the only thing I want from eating. I wouldn't be like "Yay! I had my meal in 1 second, I can get back to something else". Rather I'd be like "Whaaaaat? I wanted to stick delicious food in my mouth, taste it, chew it, lick it, swallow it. And I wanted to do that for 20-30 minutes."
There's enjoyment in the act of eating and for some, it requires quantity. I enjoy for example that Japanese desserts of often small. But I also missing being able to enjoy 40 bites of dessert rather than just 2 if that makes any sense. I enjoy eating a foot long sandwich over 10 minutes rather than a 1/4 foot long sandwich over 2.5 mins.
Sorry if I'm not making any sense. Like I said I'm not really having trouble sticking to my diet. Only noticing how I feel about it.
It sounds like intermittent fasting would be the thing for you. When you only eat one meal a day, that meal can be reasonably large. Many people do find it easier to get used to skipping meals than to eating tiny ones.
I think another problem is that a lot of the examples you are mentioning here are already prepared. I know not everybody has time to create home cooked every day, but it can make a big difference and even things like french fries can be prepared with comparatively few calories (in the oven, just lightly coated with oil).
I agree that 1500 calories are hard to stick to though, I did this for a while and lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time (19 pounds in 3 months). Once the initial, rapid weight loss was over, it felt like too much of a sacrifice for very little gain. Unfortunately that let me abandoning calorie counting altogether and putting some of the weight back on.
Now I'm on a 1800 calorie limit per day and find it perfectly manageable. I often even have 100-200 calories left at the end of a day for a snack. Around 500 calories for breakfast, 600-700 for lunch (which fell often like copious amounts of food. A bowl of pasta with marinara sauce and cheese or such) and another 400-500 for dinner, which leaves just enough room for snacks. I also make a point of eating dinner fairly early, about 12 hours before I'll have breakfast.
What I'm trying to get at is that if you eat the right food (and ideally prepare it yourself) 2000 calories (which should still lead to a significant weight loss) can go a long way without leaving you hungry at the end of the day.
>Potato-chips or fries or a sugary snack? Forget about it!
Well, it's supposed to be a diet after all :)
I think that one should remove snacks/sweets/junk foods from their life before even considering what kind of a diet one should do. After all, those are probably 50%+ of the intake (at least, they are of mine... I'm trying to stop) and there are very few foods with so many calories/carbs.
Sodas are particularly nasty, because one drink them all the day without realizing how much (my suggestion: switch to water, I've done it years ago and I couldn't be happier. Now I can't bring myself to drink a soda while eating, way too sweet).
(Unrelated) you know, I don't even like those this much. I just have a craving for them. When I finish eating those, I usually even drink a cup or two of water because I don't like the taste left in my mouth.
> Sodas are particularly nasty, because one drink them all the day without realizing how much (my suggestion: switch to water, I've done it years ago and I couldn't be happier. Now I can't bring myself to drink a soda while eating, way too sweet).
Ha, I don't understand people who say this. I've also cut sodas out of my life in exchange for water, and my weight has thanked me (a little), but I still find them delicious whenever I have them for a treat.
I agree about soda. To me it was one of the easiest things to eliminate from my diet because after a few months without one I didn't like them anymore.
I have also mostly given up fries, but I still like them even after not having any for months.
I've started logging calories recently and since I am short (160cms) and am only looking to lose 5-6 kilos, online calorie calculators advised me to go on a 1100 calories/day diet. I upped that to 1200 calories, because it would have been unhealthy otherwise, apparently and I feel like if I consume the right foods, then I can stay on 1200 calories a day somewhat comfortably. Eating out is almost always out of the question, though.
All those theories ignore the epigentics part ob obesity.
One of the main factors are what did your mother eat, when she was before puberty, and what did you eat before puberty.
Children of immigrants are often fat, because their mothers came from a culture where food was scare but natural, and they now grow up in in a culture where food is cheap and contains lots of sugar. The epigentics now cause that they will store the sugar into fat, whenever available. Grand children of immigrants are often thin again. Because their parents already grown up in a culture where food was cheap.
So there are only a few things one could do:
1st - try to keep your children thin. Let them make sport, let them drive bicycle to school, and do not drive them by car. Avoid sugar, especially fructose.
2nd - its to late, once you left puberty. Only a hormone change could change weight. Women get a 2nd chance to get thin when pregnant or during menopause. But they normally get fatter.
3rd - So just try to live with your weight. Start a sport where weight is good, e.g. sailing. Every sailor is always searching for fat crew, as self loading ballast on the rail. Even if sailing does not feel like sport, you burn lots of calories by moving your body to balance the waves. You learn to move your fat fast, and to balance yourself, even with high weight. A few years sailing might only cause 10lbs of weight loss, but the health benefit is much bigger then just the weight loss. And the self esteem gains a lot, regardless if you win a race, or only sail recreational.
There are a ton of calorie restriction experiments involving all species (except humans, since that is not realistically possible). These studies show that calorie restriction clearly results in weight loss.
Italian here. To start, there is immense peer pressure over physical appearance - god forbid a neighbour might see you in a tracksuit when you're buying some milk on Saturday morning, let alone seeing you as fat. Then you have cities built for walking, not driving, which makes a HUGE difference in the quantity of everyday low-intensity physical exercise. Then you have strict quality controls on traditional food manufacturing. Then you have a general obsession with cooking every day.
This said, as US-style food becomes more mainstream (thank you, Hollywood), obesity rates are going up in Italy as well.
I believe your mistake comes in the assumption that Italians' diet contains a disproportionate amount of pasta. American-Italian cuisine has that leaning for sure but I doubt their obesity rates are lower than the rest of the US population.
I lived in Pisa for 2 months and was surprised to find that the cuisine (at least in the region I stayed) focused heavily on seafood. I believe the cuisine in Sicily is a little closer to the pasta/tomato sauce centric cuisine which I grew up with in the Philadelphia area. But still, I am certain their is far more seafood in Sicily than one might think. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised at the amount of seafood in the cuisine in Italy, it's a skinny peninsula and Sicily is an island. :) There is also the difference in portion sizes in Italy vs the US. I certainly have no data to support that but my anecdotal experience is in line with the hypothesis.
Yeah, fish is kinda big across the whole country. In fact, Italians tend to be surprised by how fish is not particularly valued in a lot of other countries. There are geographic and historic factors in play, obviously: Pisa was one of the "Maritime Republics" city-states at one point ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_republics ) so they clearly know their sea; nearby Tuscan cities tend to be more meat-oriented.
Among other factors, I'd say that a lot of "pasta sauces" are entirely based on vegetables and prepared from fresh ingredients, something very different from processed stuff you buy in jars.
I don't think portions are a factor -- they might be smaller, but even the smallest meal will have several different types of food (pasta, meat or fish, vegetables and then fruit). Single-portion meals are very rare.
Fructose is much more of a problem than glucose. Here's a video from one of the authors referenced in the article that explains the two metabolisms in depth:
Besides whether they eat processed food or not, look into what they drink and what they have for desert in particular. In e.g. Italy or France, consumption of soda or fruit juice is low, and deserts are small and refined when it's not a simple fruit.
It's a completely different story in e.g. the UK where they binge on soda, candy, and sugary chocolate, Malta where they binge on a local soft drink so sweet your entire body is sweating with sugar from merely tasting it or Hungary where they frequently eat sweet bread and enormous sugary cakes.
I don't want to derail this into a crazy huge off-topic & mostly opinionated thread... but there can be a bunch of things going on here. Do Italians have to deal with the same food issues that people in USA deal with?
- Is corn syrup in nearly all their breads/pasta?
- Do they create their pastas(and sauce) at home rather than USA's commonly TV-dinner style or high-processed fast foods?
- I suspect that what a low income person in Italy typical eats is very different from what a low income person in America typically eats.
I do not know if this has anything to do with anything, but I do know that warmer weather affects how much I eat.
Whether summering in Italy or in hot weather in the US, I don't experience hunger the same way as when I am in cold weather. My guess is my body does not need as much energy to generate heat, and I tend to drink much more water (sweating) than have a desire for food.
Of course, this is my personal experience and genetics and does not explain obesity rates in hotter parts of the US (unless rather than water people are drinking Coke).
Like the French, Italians also drink loads of Wine. There's some theory that this has an impact. They also walk a lot more than Americans.
Looking at the UK and Ireland, my few times in those countries (especially Ireland) showed me that fast food and a lack of veggies is pretty common, especially out in the local villages. There were a few entire days while traveling throughout Ireland (as a visitor) where my choices for food in some local village were basically the local fish & chips/pizza place or the pub and that was it. The local children were pretty hefty, but the farmers and other locals were about as fit as that kind of life can make you. I did manage to find a few great local restaurants, but the meals were basically local pork in cream sauces and potatoes with a few greens. It was great food if you're working a farm or something similarly labor intensive, but sedentary lifestyles are not compatible with it.
Portion sizes and things like not downing a couple of glasses of sugary soda with a meal and then finishing with a 1000 calorie dessert make a big difference.
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:
"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.
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.
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.
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).
“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.
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.
I have a theory that being overweight is mostly caused by lack of walking. Everyone seems to get heavier as they get older, and most people seem to be slim when they're students. Regardless of how 'healthy' their lifestyle is (ie. if they eat junk food, or go jogging).
So basically my theory is that when you're a student, you're probably walking a long way to get to university each day, and then when you're there you spend a lot of time walking about campus. When you leave university and get a job, you get into a car and drive to work, and then sit at your desk most of the day. And then retreat to the family home for the evening, rather than walking about town to meet your friends. Most people are aware of their sedentariness, and put effort into diets and exercise regimes (which they never dreamt of when they were younger), but without the daily walking it's an uphill struggle. So gradually over the years they put on the pounds, until virtually all of them have lost that slim figure.
I think your theory is an oversimplification, but I agree totally that walking is an under-appreciated component of health.
Anecdote: several years ago, my brother and his wife were in their thirties and starting to get a bit soft around the middle like everyone does when they exit their twenties.
Like most Americans, they lived in a pedestrian-unfriendly city and drove everywhere. They moved to Vancouver and sold their car. Suddenly, they were walking everywhere. I went to visit them and they both looked markedly better: slimmer and healthier.
They eventually moved back to the States and they went right back to the shape they were in before.
I think walking is one of the easiest and most pleasurable things we can change to improve our health. Aside from the time cost, there's little downside to it.
Plus since walking is so pleasant, and is usually not 'deliberate' exercise (you're just trying to get somewhere), nobody feels the need to 'reward' themselves with extra food at the end of it.
While I think your theory is quite likely an oversimplification I found it interesting looking for fat people while trekking in Nepal through villages with no roads where the only way of getting around was hilly trails. Basically there were no fat people amongst the locals and fat trekkers lost weight at a healthy clip, myself included. This in spite the restaurants including things like fried rice which go against most healthy eating menus. It would be an interesting experiment to build homes for the clinically obese that were in a valley with only walking access up the hill to the nearest eatery. I'd wage money that weight loss would ensue even if the eatery was a McDonalds.
WRT "confused", google for the term "glycemic index" or "glycemic load per serving"
Its an artistic illustration of Betty Crocker vanilla cake and vanilla frosting having a GI of 42 and a total glps around 24 (for 111 grams) vs kraft mac n cheese having a GI of 64 and total glps around 32 (for 180 grams). (Yes I actually looked this up not just make up example)
Some of this is political BS in that the serving size for the mac n cheese is about 60% larger than the serving size for the cake. None the less it is a medical experimental fact that your blood sugar level will spike about 50% harder after the pasta than after the cake. Probably all the oil in the cake, and grease (if purchased) or butter (if homemade) in the frosting, and egg in the cake (intended as an emulsifier rather than a protein source).
But yeah, like it or not, WRT blood sugar levels, at the end of dinner, you're WAY better off eating a serving of cake than going back for seconds of pasta. Crazy but true.
Now notice that the total glycemic load is what annoys / kills your pancreas, so cake is slightly worse (per gram of serving). However wild crazy fluctuations in blood sugar both drive your brain crazy and screw up the rest of your body, so pasta is worse for that. Your pancreas is not in charge of the quantity of food you eat, so the net effect is eating "more cake and less pasta" will in the long run loose weight or at least result in less weight gain.
some other counterarguments are:
1. Protein digestion also raises insulin, so why doesn't a high protein diet result in weight gain?
2. There are plenty of cultures around the world whose diet is primarily starch based (eg. Kitavans). Why isn't obesity prevalent in these cultures (http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/08/kitavans-wisdo...).
3. More recently, someone lost weight while eating only potatoes for 60 days (http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-potato-die...). It'd be interesting to see the effects of just eating nuts (high fat, low carb) for 60 days.
tldr: it's not insulin that causes us to eat more than we need, it's the high reward factor and low satiety of the diet. A simple diet comprised of foods with low reward factor and high satiety makes it very easy to stay within the caloric budget.
A lot of people have had success losing weight by going with a very simple diet that is nutrient replete. The low carb thing really is BS. Sugary fruit is fine nutrition.
It's really not hard to get complete nutrition from well chosen foods like fruit and dairy. Here's 20 bananas and four pints of 1% milk, totally nutrient replete: http://imgur.com/a/X6F6j
You could eat this every day for weeks and have no problems. If you're fat you'd almost certainly lose weight and maintain muscle.
Lustig has his critics[1]. In fact, seems the mainstream almost thinks of him as a quack (almost). Myself, I can't discern who's right and wrong. I can see that a lot of people are overstating their level of certainty.
Personally, I think Lustig has gotten a bit shrill in his attempt to get notice for his discoveries and observations. I can forgive him for that.
For myself, I accepted his premise and did my own experiment: by making a minimal attempt to stay away from most sugar, I've lost 15 lbs in the last year and a half.
You're right. Oops. The claims sounded similar and the names were similar, and my brain jumped to a conclusion. Apparently, the OA has nothing (directly) to do with Lustig. I'd delete my comment if I could, but I don't see an option for that.
I first read about insulin's role in weight loss in Ferriss' book "Four Hour body", and the results from his approach have been pretty impressive (tracked 3,500 people and 84% of them lost weight)
One of the problems is that, when you are hungry, you are least likely to succeed at deciding to not overeat. Will power is a function of energy. It's why it's so easy for me to decide on things before bed, when I feel the most awake, and find it nearly impossible to pull through on them when I first wake, when I feel the most tired.
Calories and energy sources (carbs, proteins, fats) are a small part of the riddle.
Besides calories our bodies need lots of micronutrients, amino-acids, enzymes,... - the quality of the food is paramount.
Our modern food is high in calories and low in nutrients, that's mostly due to the 'advances' in modern agriculture and the whole chain of food production and distribution.
Then there is the aspect of the mind. Look into the mind of any overweight or obese person and you'll find a bucket of psychological disorders, most of them caused by poor nutrition and most of them being the reason for the person 'fixing' them with more food or alcohol or drugs.
Few people ever learn to listen to their bodies and when their bodies scream 'I need nutrients', the mind hears 'I am hungry' and goes and procures more empty calories. That's the cycle which leads to weight gain and obesity and all the related health problems.
This article goes to a lot of effort to make calorie-counting diets seem futile due to human nature, and there's certainly some truth to it. But I still think "pure" calorie counting (and by that I mean not changing much of what you eat, just how much you eat) can work for the average person.
It's just that, to "just eat less", you actually have to log everything you eat so that you can't lie to yourself and blow your calorie budget without knowing it. This is true IMO even if you're doing low-carb or any other kind of diet. Accountability and making it impossible to lie to yourself is key.
Personal anecdote follows:
I lost 50 lbs (220 -> 170 lbs at 6'2") by logging every single (non-zero-calorie) thing that passes my lips, and I've kept it off for over a year. I have no idea if the amount of willpower I have is typical, but I definitely couldn't have done it if I didn't log what I eat. My theory is that if you don't actually account for all the food you eat, you're more likely to slip out of good habits because you gradually lie to yourself more and more until you're consistently blowing your calorie budget without realizing it.
But I really have to log everything, no matter what, even when I overeat. I can never say to myself "I'm on vacation, I can skip a day" or "well I'm already way over my calorie budget, may as well stop logging." Even if I end up 1500 calories over budget, all the food I ate is right there in my log.
There's a couple of reasons why I think this works for me:
* If I log everything, then it's impossible to blow through 200-300 calories on a bagel without realizing it, because the act of logging it puts it in the front of my mind.
* So long as I log everything, I can allow myself to blow my budget now and again. But since it's logged, I know exactly how many calories I need to make up in the coming days. On a week-to-week and month-to-month basis I can make it all even out.
* Even though it's human nature to want to eat back all the calories you lost (and you will slip), there's nothing in human nature that's preventing you from logging it all. I may binge and overeat because my body's telling me to, but perhaps the next day when I realize I'm already 1500 calories over for the week because of yesterday, I'm better equipped to compensate for it and have a salad for lunch instead.
* Once you find the right number of calories, you can avoid under eating as well. For me I decided early I wanted to lose only 1 lb/week. So in the early months of my diet there was plenty of times where I was something like 600 calories under my daily budget, and I didn't feel like eating, but I forced myself to eat anyway. This throttled my weight loss, but I think it was a major factor in keeping it off... my brain never really went into the severe feast/famine recovery that made me yo-yo right back to my old weight.
The main downside of this plan though, is I have no exit strategy... I have my "maintenance level" of calories set on my logging app, and I really do plan to just log what I eat for the rest of my life. (I've been doing it for two years straight now.) It's completely automatic for me (I use the "Lose It!" app on my iPhone) so I don't even see it as a burden any more, but I know that as soon as I stop I'll slip back into my old habits and gain all my weight back.
Out of curiosity: How many calories per day are you aiming for and how did you come up with that number?
I'm currently going for 1800 calories and after losing a decent amount of weight initially, I feel I'm making fairly little progress (to be expected). It seems to me that I actually lose more weight when I go a bit over the limit, which leads me to believe I might be eating so little that my metabolism slows down.
When I was losing weight I was trying for around 2100 calories per day, and that brought me to around 1 lb/week of weight loss.
From what I've read, the rule of thumb is 3500 calories = 1 lb of fat, so in a week, you want to run a 500 calorie deficit each day. That, and most of the online calorie estimators seemed to cluster around 2600 calories/day for "maintenance" for me, assuming a mostly sedentary lifestyle. So I came up with 2100 and that mostly worked.
It's important to "dial it in" though, by weighing yourself at the same time every day and keeping track of how much you've lost in a given week. At first I was doing 1800 calories per day and I was losing too much, so I bumped up my number up to 2100 and leveled off a bit.
Nowadays I'm doing 2600 per day and I'm coasting pretty well, maybe losing a tiny bit, but making up for it by blowing my budget on occasion. 2600 is very easy to hit though... I can still do fast food for lunch and have no problem making my budget so long as I don't overdo it too much.
I lost 20 kilos by working out, but not the way you think. I just felt guilty eating fatty foods afterwards, because "then that whole hour of boring workout would be wasted".
The main reason people fail in dieting is they go too low in calories or protein, which drops the metabolic rate. This makes the diet seem futile because fat loss pretty much stops, and also you tend to feel lousy with a lower metabolism.
You have to constrain calories somewhat while making sure not to lower the metabolic rate. You can do this by tracking resting body temperature and pulse rate. If you wake up in the morning and have a body temperature much below 98F, you need to eat more. You also want to maintain a resting pulse rate over 70 bpm. If these measures dip, you are probably going too low in carbs or protein.
The fact is, only quite slow fat loss is safe and sustainable. All the more reason to not get fat in the first place.
Agreed 100%. It's also another reason why I like logging caloric intake... it's also good at preventing yourself from undereating.
It is a bit hard though, when you look at your goals and see that it'll take you 50 weeks to get to your goal weight at your current rate.
But then you realize: even when you hit your goal weight, you're not done, so there should be no hurry to get there. Keeping track of what I eat is a lifestyle for me now, not just a diet.
>>In studies by Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel of Columbia and colleagues, when lean and obese research subjects were underfed in order to make them lose 10 to 20 percent of their weight, their hunger increased and metabolism plummeted. Conversely, overfeeding sped up metabolism.
This is kind of useless without knowing if they underfed by decreasing amount of food for each feeding time or reducing the numbers of feeding times. The whole idea of eating many small meals during the day instead of a few big ones. Also, depending on the amount of exercising these people are doing these results could go either way.
>>Several prominent clinical trials reported no difference in weight loss when comparing diets purportedly differing in protein, carbohydrate and fat. However, these trials had major limitations; at the end, subjects reported that they had not met the targets for complying with the prescribed diets.
I would really like to know the percentage of subjects who did not comply with the diets. So far the evidence from many clinical trials shows that there is no effect of diet content on weight loss, as much as I like the article's point.
Is this something new for the American population? Hasn't this been known for years or decades already? That's why there are low-carb diets.
Put that in combination with calorie intake and exercise and your fat will gradually disappear. It's not exactly rocket science.
Calorie reduction and exercise will reduce your body fat even if you eat mostly carbs. The trouble is that it's hard to stick to a low-calorie diet if you're mostly eating carbs.
Of course this isn't new information for people who make an effort to learn and care about their health. There has been a big push in America towards low-carb diets thanks to Dr. Atkins, although it's unclear that a ketogenic diet has higher utility than some other kinds of calorie restriction.
But, there are many people in America that don't care enough to know, and more to the point, we benefit in motivation from every reminder that our eating habits are fucked up.
I wish I was fat so I could achieve my weight goals by sitting around working, watching TV, and not eating. Trust me, trying to gain weight is way more difficult and expensive and time consuming.
Everyone wants to be told that it isn't their fault that bad things have happened. Its a pernicious, harmful urge most often on display in courtrooms and discussions on weight and diet. Unfortunately reality is what it is: if you eat without consideration and control in this modern world of low-cost calories, then you will get fat. Accepting and acknowledging that you are 100% accountable as to what and how much you eat is a necessary first step to avoiding that end state.
> Everyone wants to be told that it isn't their fault that bad things have happened.
Actually, the general cultural attitudes are to castigate overweight individuals for some sort of moral failing. In reality, it is substantially harder for different people with different genes to maintain a lower weight. Disregarding that is purely callous and is equivalent to denying the existence of phenomena like addiction.
People are 100% accountable, but that doesn't mean we should ignore that it's harder for certain people to make the "right" choice. It also doesn't mean we shouldn't give them support and assistance to make the right choice.
I see both happening. I see major attitudes of helplessness or victim mentality. Or just ambivalence. Go to any mall. We all know this story.
But also, it then becomes a thing where those who do have their head in the right place to pursue health in a practical and beneficiary (edit: beneficial) manner, these folks often do turn around and moralize. It's too bad.
The real truth is, we need to forget about those types of things, for a little while at least, and concentrate purely on the facts. The consequences. What is actually occurring. Because in the end, it doesn't matter what peoples' intentions are, or motives, or desires, or anything else. What matters are consequences.
That said, of course it's incumbent upon anyone promoting health to offer a helping hand, only, and never anything else. Never any judgment. Because not one of us is "above it."
It's probably rational to expect people to behave in irrational ways, isn't it? Calling people 100% accountable for their actions is not a reflection of reality, it's morality.
Yeah I think in a rational society nothing would be left up to willpower, moral fortitude, honour etc. as they are bound to fail.
However they are still attainable ideals and worth striving for.
I certainly have a tendency to be fat, I am always really hungry and just plain greedy when it comes to food, my dad has always been a bit fat, I grew up eating oven food: waffles, fried chicken etc.
When I started getting close to 30 I could see myself starting to get fat and I just went "No! I will not be fat" In aid of this I have developed myself a pretty healthy lifestyle over the years that includes plenty of exercise, fruits vegetables and water, and I abstain from sugar and things of that ilk. As a result I am fitter than most people my age, in fact I'm doing a 200k cycle in a few weeks :)
edit: You know there is probably a willpower / self worth feedback cycle too. If you give into temptation once you feel bad about yourself and are probably then more likely to to fall again.
This argument can really be filed under the "I want to wash my hands of the whole affair by stating fat people simply should eat less and it's all their fault" Obesity rates have soared. Inquisitive minds want to know what is driving that change? It appears to be more than simply "oh a whole new generation just doesn't have the will power of people as recently as 20 or 25 years ago"
As this article points out people who are trying to lose weight and following the advice of 'experts' may have been doing the wrong thing Staying hungry eating grain bread, pastas and fruit and not satiating themselves with enough fats or proteins. Jump in and join the discussion don't try and dismiss it with a disdainful wave of the hand.
Experts have never said "eat bread" or "eat pasta" to people dieting. Are you mistaking "expert advice" for "populist nonsense"? You wouldn't be alone. Every single HN thread about nutrition contains fucking awful pseudo-scientific nonsense supported by anecdote with no actual science anywhere.
Given how little calories exercise burn per hour or per mile and I don't see blame on walking or not being a big factor. It surely is in the popular culture.
Most importantly this idea is dangerous because it is used often in the PR campaigns of processed food manufacturers. "Drink the 1L soda bottle, it is ok, because then you can walk around the block to burn it off!" kind of idea.
The act of walking itself doesn't burn very many calories, no, but it does strengthen your legs (the largest muscles in your body) which then burn more calories 24/7.
The food and quality of food that is available to many people is a factor, which is could be said is generally out of their control. I don't think it's helpful to blame the individual as we are all part of systems.
Experience with the root cause of stomach ulcers and mental illness would seem to indicate the philosophical moral arguments about "weakness" and "accountability" eventually end up sounding obsolete, regretted, and medieval.
"if you eat without consideration and control" the battle is you vs an entire army of PR people and biochemists focused on defeating you for profit. My betting money is on the army. The moral and ethical failure is creating a civilization designed to kill in exchange for a few making high profits, its not a moral or ethical failure for some wanna-be Rambo's getting wiped out by the combined arms attack of an entire army. Or, a "hate the game not the players" argument.
>Accepting and acknowledging that you are 100% accountable as to what and how much you eat is a necessary first step to avoiding that end state.
You are technically correct, except in the case of children who were raised with terrible eating habits and found themselves with the same habits and damage in adulthood. In my (terribly uninformed) opinion, I think this is more common than we give it credit, and the behavioral effects of several years or more of terrible eating is more powerful and controlling than we give it credit.
The statement "You are 100% accountable" is very good for empowering individuals to change, but it is commonly confused as something intended to shame.
If you want to improve, you'd better take accountability.
Looking for places where to put blame is useless in situations where there isn't moral hazard, or where you are unable to punish the blamed. On those cases, you're left with the choice of accepting your part of the problem and correcting it, or keep suffering.
Would it be going too far to say the type of person who would most benefit from the nutritional advice of this column is also unlikely to be the type of person who reads the New York Times.
And to the person who says that what people put into their mouths is, "generally out of their control" - imagine a legal setting and some crime committed, the only way to claim diminished responsibility is to be a minor or plead various forms of insanity. Are we saying that most overweight/obese people are borderline insane when we're invoking the, "it's not their fault" argument?
> Would it be going too far to say the type of person who would most benefit from the nutritional advice of this column is also unlikely to be the type of person who reads the New York Times.
Um, yes. I don't at all understand your point. That's the most ridiculous point I've heard in a long time.
Are you somehow insinuating that overweight people are not well-read or intelligent? The many, many overweight NYT readers I know (including myself) would beg to differ.
> And to the person who says that what people put into their mouths is, "generally out of their control"
Your attitude is a terrible example of the moralistic viewpoint which this article disparages. Being overweight is in no way equivalent to a crime.
Choice is not a binary. Of course people have some control over what they eat, but it's well established by science that different people at different times have different drives to eat. Or are you completely dismissing addiction as a phenomenon?
> That's the most ridiculous point I've heard in a long time.
How is it ridiculous? It's not a personal slur on you. Do you deny that people from lower socio-economic backgrounds generally suffer more from overweight issues and obesity? Wouldn't you say that people from this type of background are less likely to consume their mass media in the form of the New York Times?
> Being overweight is in no way equivalent to a crime.
That's not what I said. Read again what I wrote. Another example. I smoke cigarettes. Should I not take responsibility for this? If I can't stop smoking is it "out of my control"? I'm not making a binary choice out of anything, I'm just contesting the following comment elsewhere here (I should have made a separate comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7762934
> The food and quality of food that is available to many people is a factor, which is could be said is generally out of their control. I don't think it's helpful to blame the individual as we are all part of systems.
There is nowhere in the developed world where you can't buy decent fresh food. At some point along the way some of the responsibility must lie with the person who is choosing to buy one type of food over another because perhaps its pre-made, pre-packaged, hits their pleasure centres, whatever. I guess it relates back to my first point in that I imagine that people like this may not be as informed about nutrition as you or I. And if they are informed then what?
Because you're taking a correlation and eliminating the lower data point. Yes, people with better educations tend to eat better, but not by much. In fact, for adult males there is no correlation between education and obesity prevalence. [1]
I, and the many other overweight NYT readers, certainly exist. We could also benefit from this article. Should we not get access to it because of your faulty moralistic viewpoint?
> Should I not take responsibility for this? If I can't stop smoking is it "out of my control"?
Of course it is partially in your control, but you totally missed the nuance. It would probably be much harder for you (as a smoker) to choose to not smoke a cigarette today than for me (as a non-smoker). That doesn't make me better than you, it's just an acknowledgement of addiction as a phenomenon. Acknowledging it helps us to build better for strategies for helping people to make good choices.
Also, two individuals who have the exact same diet and exercise can weigh very differently depending on their genetic makeup and background. How is that their fault?
> The food and quality of food that is available to many people is a factor, which is could be said is generally out of their control. I don't think it's helpful to blame the individual as we are all part of systems.
What the fuck? I didn't even say that. Way to put words in my mouth.
I know you didn't say that. Which is _why_ I said, "I'm just contesting the following comment elsewhere here (I should have made a separate comment)" and then I posted the link to the comment which said it. I'm not arguing with you, I'm arguing with that comment so you need to go read it if you want to debate that. I probably shouldn't have rolled two viewpoints into the one post as it seems to have totally confused the issue.
The opening paragraph of the piece you linked to says, "People with higher levels of education and higher income have lower rates of many chronic diseases compared to those with less education and lower income levels, according to Health, United States, 2011 – the government’s annual comprehensive report on Americans’ health." which seems to back up my viewpoint,
Which is all that I've been saying. I'm sorry if it offends you but I'm going to stick by what I've said - (in general terms) the type of person who might most benefit from this article in the New York Times is less likely to be the type of person to read the New York Times. Note that I am _not_ saing that overweight people do not read the New York Times, if you got that from what I said I'm sorry I didn't word it better but I'm not taking it back.
Mixing replies and quotes from two different comments completely muddles the waters and confuses the issue of authorship. Please don't do that.
If you looked a little closer at the report I linked to, you would find that "obesity prevalence among adult males did not vary consistently with level of education." Which is in fact exactly what I stated.
Sure, NYT non-readers might on average be fitter than NYT readers. But that's hardly a reason for it not being beneficial to or interesting to NYT readers. By that logic, we should never post intro coding tutorials to HN because on average they'd be more helpful to the general public than HN readers.
I've been helping my family and friends with this recipe, and it's changing lives. Literally. My father, who I taught how to eat vegetarian, has stopped needing insulin! (After heading steadily down the standard American road...sad...)
If you add this smoothie to your daily life, and change nothing else, you will feel better. A lot better. You can still eat bacon and eggs for breakfast (I don't recommend that, but you can), and you can still eat a pulled pork sandwich for dinner (also, don't recommend), but if you have this smoothie around the middle of the day, you will feel better and experience benefits. More or less immediately from day one.
You are quite literally what you eat. How could it possibly be otherwise?
EDIT: easily worth any down votes I may receive here. Computer enthusiasts and professionals, for the most part, in my observation, have a huge blind spot for their health. Huge. So down vote away, my friends. As long as you are also involved in your health!
I don't think you are getting downvotes because developers don't care about their health. It's because you are saying that ONE smoothie is changing lives... which is a ridicolous statement. And it honestly sounds like an attempt for self promotion.
Also, serious question: why is sharing something in a higher bandwidth format than just typing "promotion?" Do you not promote your own thoughts and agenda any time you enter a comment? When I have no product, nothing for sale, no ads on the video, nothing like that, how does one conclude that sharing something, which is just me, commenting, really, in a higher bandwidth format, how do you conclude "promotion?" As I say, serious question.
Well you have no proof whatsoever of your claims. No question that it's a healthy thing to consume, but saying it will change lives from day one without changing anything else is just a very bold statement to make without backing it up with anything.
Kudos for the recipe though.
It is not a claim about the future. It's a fact, referring to the past. Of course I will not, but I could easily fish out thank you letters and comments about positive change from a private forum.
I promote your health, sir. Not myself. Forget about me. Think about you. And in particular, note that I don't have any ads on my video. It's really about you. If you can believe that. Sometimes people try to do good for its own sake, even in this day and age. Crazy, huh?
Fine. "Everyone who has tried this, and it's about 20 people at this point, from local people (my family, for example, local friends) to those I only know online--every single one of these people has experienced benefits and shared their happiness with me."
How's that? Don't be a cynic. Don't be too far above it all. Don't "know it all" already. Just try it. Because, while the video is new-ish (I used to have a different one, years ago), my doing this is years in the making. Years. This is no fly-by-night experiment.
This article belongs to the very few that actually do a job of describing a feedback cycle, but then it falls short and does the popular simplification thing.
Fat cells emit hormones that cause hunger, and they actually do require energy for upkeep. The body prioritizes not losing any of its substance, so most "healthy" adults will always at least eat the amount they need to not lose weight. On top of that come fatal breakages in the messaging system the body uses to control the flow of energy. Fat people are prone to insulin resistance, physical extension of their digestive system that leads to the urge for more throughput, and other mechanisms - all of which cause an almost insurmountable desire to eat a lot.
It's an addiction that subverts two of our most powerful mental priorities: the reward/pleasure system and the survival instinct. In most people there is not a lot that can be done to overcome what these two systems tell you. That's why diets fail: my body is lying to me. It's like getting two popup alert boxes every minute, one saying "you are DYING! eat something" and the other goes "you're unhappy, eat something, you deserve some happiness".