[metamet]

> Americans don't seem to have unique physical traits that cause them to gain weight, we just don't have healthy habits

A diet of hyper-palatable, nutritionally void processed food will do that.

Eat real food. Meat, fish, nuts, fruits, veggies, maybe some carb-dense grains (I like rice) here and there when your body can take advantage of the extra glucose, and you'd be surprised how easy it is to both manage your hunger and your weight.

[nsxwolf]

Frankly, this is bunk. If it's calories in and calories out, then there is an exact number of daily potato chips one can calculate for each person to achieve and maintain an ideal weight. You'll get just as fat on "real food".

[lowbloodsugar]

If you eat 200 calories of sugar, your body will turn it into fat, and you'll be hungry in 20 minutes, suffer mood swings, migraines and eventually diabetes. If you eat 200 calories of protein, fats and slow carbs, you'll be full, and you'll be able to function until the next meal.

The quality of your calories absolutely matters.

[NikolaeVarius]

It might matter to mood, but it doesn't matter in terms of weight gain/loss.

You could eat nothing but 1000 calories of pure sugar a day and still lose weight

[jogjayr]

> You could eat nothing but 1000 calories of pure sugar a day and still lose weight

Yes, if you were locked in a room and passed exactly 1000 calories of sugar cubes and water every single day. Most of us live in the real world with food all around us, easily available, and responsibilities to stay on top of. It's really easy to say "this diet is making me feel terrible, I'm just going to eat what I want so I won't be so cranky to my kids".

[lowbloodsugar]

And likewise you could take a knife and cut out belly fat. It is possible. However it has significant negatives that make it unlikely that people will follow through with the idea. I totally agree that if a person is successful at eating only 1000 calories of sugar per day then they will lose weight. But they wont be successful.

[NikolaeVarius]

You know that's a completely irrelevant comparison. There is nothing causing a person to gain back weight after losing it outside of willpower.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/

[nsxwolf]

Now if only you could put willpower in a bottle.

Calorie restriction diets feel like holding your breath for 6 months straight. Then as soon as you can't take it anymore, you exhale and instantly gain it all back. It's horrible. Nobody's will can hold out for that long.

Some people are happy eating whatever diet keeps them at an ideal weight. Some people never will be, and it's a form of torture.

[metamet]

Willpower, hunger, and habit.

[TheCoelacanth]

This is like saying that all that matters to your bank account balance is dollars in and dollars out. It's obviously true in the most trivial sense, but it's not useful advice. There are countless other factors that affect the amount in and amount out.

If someone is trying to increase their bank balance which advice is more likely to help them: "Just increase your dollars in or decrease your dollars out" or "Get a roommate, move to a less expensive neighborhood, cook your own food instead of eating out"?

[metamet]

Of course it's about calories. But hormonal responses and insulin resistance affect how your body handles nutrition and regulates hunger.

One tends to regulate itself, while the other requires strict (and rarely followed) calorie counting.

If you eat hyper palatable food that makes you hungrier, you'll eat more. Pure and simple.

[ithinkinstereo]

That's technically true, though anecdotally, my body def responds differently to whole vs processed foods. Even if the cals and macro nutrients (Protein/Fat/Carbs) remain the same.

[cookiecaper]

Yes, there's a systemic issue here. Just as we don't say "Users just need to be smarter!" when a substantial segment of the population is having difficulty accessing our programs, we shouldn't say "Eaters just need to eat fewer calories!" when OVER HALF of the population is getting sick on the food supply.

Try to buy something healthy at your conventional grocer. It's generally tucked away at the far extremities of the aisle if it's there at all, and you normally have to bypass several fake "healthy" options that are really just slightly different formulations of the primary recipe. You have to really hunt just to find something as simple as a loaf of bread that isn't infused with extra sugar. Some loaves that bill themselves as "wheat" are still mostly white bread, etc. There is a large array of deceptive tactics used to get people to buy the more addictive formulations when they think they're buying healthier ones.

IMO this is a technology problem. We have sufficient technology to bring a steady supply of maximally-desirable foods, which, unfortunately, tend to have the least nutritional value. This creates perverse incentives across the marketplace because grocers, suppliers, distributors, and farmers all want to sell more, which means they will always favor the higher-calorie options, because human biology always favors it. It's a really bad place to stall at a technological stasis.

Instead of fighting chemistry and biology and berating those who fall victim not only to their own strong physical inclinations but also to a barrage of marketing tactics designed to trick them into continuing to buy addictive-but-unhealthy foods when they're explicitly trying not to do so, we need to develop technology that makes broccoli maximally-desirable without changing its basic nutritional and caloric properties, or technology that infuses maximally-desirable foods with nutritional and caloric properties akin to maximally-nutritious foods.

I don't think most people are compulsive overeaters. There's a myth among some naive people that every overweight person has a stash of 40 SNICKERS bars constantly at hand and that they eat 10 of these per day. This is not true except in the most extreme cases. The truth is that most people eat reasonably normal amounts and types of foods.

[Ductapemaster]

I would actually take it one step further than technology as the root of the problem. That technology was developed because market competition made each of the producers have to differentiate their products, which has manifested itself in a bar-raising game. The easy optimizations have all been done already, and now these companies optimize for flavor, since nutritional value won't make customers return to your products. The companies are playing a psychological and physiological game with us, they know it, and they spend millions doing so.

A good article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

[cookiecaper]

I agree, but I don't blame them. Survival depends on market performance. If customers aren't buying what they're selling, they have to make something customers will buy.

I don't think the solution is to constrain the food companies. That's a hardcoded workaround at best, and the potential ramifications do not seem pleasant. We can't turn back the hands of time; the fact is that the demand is there, and while minor attempts to curb demand like a junk food tax may help a little bit, the core issue is that our bodies crave those foods at a fundamental level. Our bodies punish us for wasting what it interprets as a valuable food store by making us extremely uncomfortable. Creating a black market for Doritos is unlikely to provide real social benefit.

We need to find a way to fix the technological state of having the ability to create unnaturally hyper-caloric foods, which our bodies love, but not the ability to properly dispose of the excess calories. We need to a) make our bodies love low-or-no calorie foods (and Splenda et al are great innovations in this space, though obviously not complete); b) make our bodies dispose of excess calories in a healthy manner, instead of putting them into excessive fat stores (this may be something like a medical device or drug that 'consumes' the calories on behalf of the digestive system); c) make high-calorie foods filling and nutritious, so that one Milky Way provides satiation and nutritional benefits that align with its calorie count.

[metamet]

And it doesn't help that the industry specifically designs foods to not fill you up, so you continue to eat more.

Check out Salt Sugar Fat if you haven't read it yet. Good stuff: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/08129...

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

I've lost 20 lbs that way, eating real food.