[scrollaway]

This is like saying "cpu instructions is all that matters [to programming] at the end of the day".

CICO is what it breaks down to. But it implies that you can start counting calories, mathing it out against exercise, and be done. The road to get to that equation actually working is a long one, one that involves eating better (not just less), and getting long term strategies in place. (This comment is excellent to that point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17392744)

[radix07]

CICO is more like Python: print 'hello world!'.

It's crazy simple and there is a ton going on beneath the hood, but nobody needs to go that deep to get the job done. If you find some other libraries/tricks that help make your life easier, use them!

If you really want to start optimizing metabolic timings and portioning and macros and micros and all that, that's great too! But I don't see why getting started with a healthy diet has to be so complicated: eat healthy, eat less, burn calories. Don't over think it.

[scrollaway]

I'm ok with this analogy, but:

> But I don't see why getting started with a healthy diet has to be so complicated

This is a failure on your part. Dieting is an extremely hard and complicated thing for many, many people, as you can plainly see in this thread. That you don't see what's so complicated about your suggestion is a hint that you're missing a part of the picture.

Let's start with "Eat healthy": How do you do that? What do you define as healthy? How do you do it when you're strapped for cash? How do you even find healthy food, even if you know what to look for?

"Eat less": How do you determine what to cut? How much of it do you cut? Will cutting something cause you to crave something else?

"Burn calories": This is the hardest one. There's no easy way of checking how many calories you burn every day. "20 minutes of running" is very different from one person to the next, so even timing yourself isn't always enough. At the gym, machines sometimes have estimates for how much you're burning... but that's all they are, and it's a tiny tiny portion of how much you are burning.

"Don't over think it": I like what a poster said elsewhere in the comments: We need to start treating obesity as we treat mental illness. Just as "Just cheer up" is not an appropriate thing to tell someone clinically depressed, your suggestions are not useful to someone who is unable to lose weight. Do you think they haven't tried? What do you think is supposed to happen when people keep telling them "Just eat less" and it's not working, are they not supposed to overthink it?

[radix07]

Yes, it is a hard thing for many people, I don't question that by any means. But it's not technically hard, it's mentally and instinctually hard. We have known how to eat healthy forever, you see something green or meaty that looks appetizing, we eat it. Now that has gotten harder to filter of course, but we all know what fruits and vegetables are and that things like Mc Donalds are bad for you.

Perhaps I am a bit out of touch, but I have never met someone that didn't really know these things or that more calories are bad, sugar is in everything that is processed, and that exercise of any sort will help keep you healthy and lose weight.

Psychologically there is a lot going on with people's relationship with food, but by just putting more barriers and rules and reading material in front of them is just confusing the situation.

Start small, cut back a single pop per day for example. That's 15 pounds a year in calories! Do a couple pushups in the morning. Whatever it takes to get started and build from there. If you just dump all these "what if's" and "how to's" in front of everyone they will get distracted from what they need to do and feel like they failed at something that doesn't need to be that complex.