[marcinzm]

>This is something that actually annoys me immensely when people say "you eat too much!" to fat people. Two people can have the exact same diet and the exact same exercise regime, and if one assimilates particular foods more effectively they'll be getting more calories, and put on weight. Food intake is far more complex than many people believe.

I don't see why that statement is inaccurate. It's not "you eat more than me" but "you eat too much." As in you eat too much versus how much your body is able to burn of the calories it assimilates.

[moron4hire]

The problem is that it is usually presented as a "simple" solution. "Just eat less. Reduce your food intake until you're at a calorie deficit". For some people, that can mean eating three small, but satisfying meals a day. For others, it can mean eating extremely strict rations for only two meals a day, leaving the person constantly hungry and cranky. Then it becomes a will power issue, which as we all know is a function of brain energy reserves (right, we all know that, right?!). Throw in a mentally challenging job versus just phoning it in and it's really not actionable advice.

[dev_tty01]

I agree that a dramatic change is very difficult and the level of difficulty varies from person to person. However, obesity is probably one of the worst long term health predictors. If it leads to diabetes, almost all outcomes get much worse. The change is worth the difficulty.

For me, I quantified what I was eating and simply reduced it a bit by careful tracking. I also did quite a bit of relatively low heart rate exercise and did do some shift of the calories away from carbs. I also identified some intake that was purely habit and not sustaining, like late evening snacks, and eliminated or modified those. Lost 35 pounds in a few months. It may take a while, but the math works over time. It is relatively simple, but it is not easy. I kind of turned it into a game and that helped a bit. At any rate, I wish anyone who decides to try the best of luck.

[Invictus0]

It's a willpower issue for 3 days, the time it takes for your stomach and appetite to readjust to a lower volume of food intake. Anyone who's fasted knows how easy skipping meals is--it's certainly not the agonizing test of willpower you and many nonfasters seem to think it is.

And by the way, if diet and exercise are not the path to weight loss, then what is?

[marcinzm]

You also don't need to eat that much less if you're at a stable weight. 10% less a day means you lose a pound every 1-2 weeks. In my experience people seem to not like it when you tell them, after they ask, that you lost weight simply by eating a bit less every day consistently for a year.

[renox]

Trying currently to lose weight: the reason why I don't 'like' this answer is because I don't track my food intake closely enough to be able to know what removing 10% means.

So I guess that the first step is write everything you eat in a way you can monitor it, to be able to reduce it by a small amount if necessary..

Any advice on how to do it?

[Invictus0]

Don't do a bunch of tracking: it's too much effort and you'll have a hard time sticking with it. Try 16:8 fasting (you can only eat within an 8 hour period each day). I also recommend reading this post to understand how the body works in terms of weight loss: https://karpathy.github.io/2020/06/11/biohacking-lite/

[marcinzm]

You don't really need to track your intake perpetually as I see it. But measure you weight weekly. Same time and day to better account for water/food/etc.

If your weight is not going down then try to eat somewhat less. Maybe skip a side or order a salad instead of fries or get 1% milk with your coffee. Or cut a potato from your dinner if you're cooking.

That said, tracking for a while is good to figure out what you can cut since you may not realize how much you eat (snacks, night snacks, soda, etc.).

In my case I stopped eating those free chips at work and stopped drinking a can of coke with lunch. I also tried to avoid large dinners but just large enough ones that I wouldn't go to sleep feeling hungry.

[sn9]

Get a food scale and measure everything for a few days, storing the information in an app like Cronometer.

[crdrost]

Diet and exercise are indeed not the path to weight loss. This is well known: most fad diets work this way in some fashion or another, and it’s well known that most fad diets fail.

Since it touches my field, physics, why people have this misapprehension, (“a calorie is a calorie” is an attempt at a thermodynamic statement) I feel somewhat qualified to talk about part of this even though I am not an endocrinologist or a nutritionist, they would have better answers for you in many other respects.

Thermodynamics is necessary but not sufficient to understand the problem. There are many physical problems with ending the explanation there.

The first is that it ignores equilibrium. So, the claim is that I can diet and exercise down to the weight that I want and then return to the lifestyle that I had before but maintain this new weight. That is, when you say diet and exercise you are talking about temporary interventions and no temporary intervention is going to permanently disrupt the equilibrium. Put another way, most people calculate a basal metabolic rate or total daily energy expenditure at their present weight, and leave it at that. If you're a physicist, you start to want to calculate it at two different rates, you want to see the slope between the two, so you get units of kJ/s/kg, but a kg of fat also maps to a certain number of kJ so this is actually a time constant of something like a year—some crude differential equations then suggest that the time constant is something like the half-life of your weight, so if you start living like someone who is 50 lb lighter than you, after a decent chunk of a year you will be 25 lb lighter, then 37.5 lb lighter after another... Basically just that we regress to a weight set by lifestyle. So the focus on an intervention is wrong. Instead one needs to focus on a whole lifestyle shift. You need to focus on setting a new equilibrium, not on burning calories.

But this is a really crude model and that gets into the second point, which is that you are assuming that the system is linear, like an electronic circuit made only out of inductors and capacitors and resistors. The problem is, it is not, it is in fact a complex system of feedback loops braided together. Picture’s worth a thousand words here,

http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1

You know, that thing.

Once you have feedback loops, there is no guarantee that changing the input voltage to an electronic circuit by 10% will reduce some voltage observed inside the system by 10%. It might, it might not. Changing a complex system requires a fundamentally different approach. Often to change one output, the entire system needs to be reconfigured.

As a direct consequence of this, it turns out that most people who go on diet plans hit “the wall.” At the wall, the feedback loops in your body are downregulating your basal metabolism and your perception of available energy. They are jacking up hormones that make you hungry, and also inducing you to wear more sweaters and other such things. They impel you to have “cheat days.” Part of the cause of this may be that your body does not know how to burn just fat. If your body runs out of energy it starts burning everything, both fat and muscle, to make that energy. As a result if you don't target your exercise and diet to build muscle, losing weight quickly actually can maybe drop your lean muscle mass, and your body is reacting to this global damage by telling you that you're sick, because you are. At least, that's one explanation I have seen, I am not a doctor and do not have any qualifications in this way. For all I know, maybe the body is using your fat to try to sequester some sort of toxin or pollutant from the environment, and suddenly dropping the weight releases all of this crap into your blood and that's the reason that your body suddenly wants to put on weight again. Don't ask me these questions

These sorts of feedback loops are why I would recommend listening to endocrinologists, the endocrine system is a signaling system in the body, so these people are very keenly aware of all of these feedback loops and how they reinforce each other. In his recent Metabolical, Dr. Lustig, a research endocrinologist, suggests that focusing on weight for health outcomes is actually totally backwards anyway, that there are more thin sick people than fat sick people in terms of absolute number, and that sickness should come first and wait is probably just a symptom that some people don't express. He gives some better advice about the benefits of healthy eating—studies where they kept calorie consumption and weight the same, and demonstrated huge improvements in health markers, simply by switching out sugary kid food for starchy kid food. Stuff like that.

The insight from complex systems is that telling people to focus on diet and exercise is deeply blaming and that blame might drive shame spirals that are causing the problem in the first place, which is again where I have to step back and hand the problem over to psychologists this time. Viewed this way the problem is that you have an unhealthy relationship with food, and it is unlikely that telling you to diet and exercise is going to magically make it a healthy relationship with food. Mindfulness exercises while eating could for example be a better option. Telling people to eat when they are hungry, but they have to put it on a plate and sit in a dining room and put away their phone and enjoy the food with gusto and stop when they are full: this might help with these binges.

[Invictus0]

> Diet and exercise are indeed not the path to weight loss. This is well known: most fad diets work this way in some fashion or another, and it’s well known that most fad diets fail.

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not suggesting people go on keto or weight watchers. Those fad diets don't necessarily fail because they're ineffective, although they probably are--they fail because they are highly prescriptive and restrictive and it's difficult for people to actually execute the diet.

What I'm saying is that reducing total food intake for 3 days creates a lasting decrease in appetite. You can prove this to yourself by skipping breakfast for a few days: after a while, you will simply not be hungry at breakfast time.

The best post I've ever seen on weight loss comes from Andrej Karpathy, head of AI at Tesla: https://karpathy.github.io/2020/06/11/biohacking-lite/

[arunix]

I skipped breakfast (and lunch) for two years. I learned that I could push back against the hunger pain, but I was hungry, and my appetite did not decrease (I was hoping it would).

[iso1337]

Americans love to come up with complicate theories about why it’s impossible for them to lose weight.

Go to Europe or East Asia and you’ll see it’s definitely possible and definitely influenced by diet (as in what you eat).

The reasons people are fat here are the huge serving sizes, the corn/meat/milk subsidies, and car culture.

[Wowfunhappy]

I mean, I could say the same thing about quitting cigarettes. I absolutely realize it’s hard to do, and that’s why so many people still smoke. But my advice would be the same...

[onion2k]

The problem here is that you think you're giving people advice when really you're just telling them what to do. The difference is that advice comes with kindness, compassion, an understanding of how the advice is affected by someone's situation and context, and deep knowledge of the subject you're advising about.

Equating changes to diet for weight reduction to quitting cigarettes shows you probably don't have that.

[eric_cc]

How does the poster comparing two difficult life changes indicate a lack of compassion?

[brokenmachine]

He's telling them what will actually work, not simply what to do.

Eat more than your base calories and you will be fat. Smoke and you will be unhealthy.

Reality can't be expected to be kind, compassionate and understanding.

It's simply reality, and that's the way it is.

[moron4hire]

... and that is also extremely bad advice. There is very wide variability in how nicotine addiction affects different people. Some people can quit after a pack-a-day habit and have no problems. Some people have trouble with getting off a pack-a-week habit.

Someone who is having extreme difficulty quitting smoking could benefit from working with a doctor to discuss quit-smoking aids or even seeing a therapist to work through their addiction.

No shit, the person needs to "just stop". Way to point out the obvious. Most people don't have a "just stop" button.

IDK, maybe you're just bad at giving advice. Maybe you should just stop.

EDIT: this is seriously an article on The Onion in the making. "Nation wakes up to random forum poster telling them to 'just eat less'. Obesity epidemic ends overnight." The proof is in the pudding here. Telling people "just eat less" is shitty advice.

[pverghese]

People need to develop agency in actually doing something to lose weight which essentially comes down to eating less. It might be painful in the short term but is a huge benefit in the long term.

All I've found online is people giving excuses as to why one body type cannot do this or that, which essentially are the same reasons smokers give when trying to quit(too stressed, can't quit cold turkey etc).

[eric_cc]

It’s true. Most of us have vices. Psychologically it’s more comfortable to make excuses up. But we are responsible for our own behavior.

[eric_cc]

It really is as simple as “eat less”. Input / Output.

The obesity epidemic is complex but big factors include poor decision making, psychological issues, sugar sugar sugar.

Still, at the end of the day it’s input / output. You can’t gain weight by sucking in too much air.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Someone who is having extreme difficulty quitting smoking could benefit from working with a doctor to discuss quit-smoking aids or even seeing a therapist to work through their addiction.

Oh—absolutely! As I said, it’s hard, and frequently requires professional help, strategies, etc.

But, it ultimately comes down to, you have to find a way to quit! You shouldn’t let yourself off the hook.

[lozenge]

Cravings go away, saying to just eat less can be telling somebody they have to be hungry for the rest of their lives.

[Wowfunhappy]

Is that true? I was actually under the impression that people's appetites do eventually adjust (especially if you reduce your intake slowly), although it can take years.

[marcinzm]

Except it is as I see it. The goal is to eat less and to achieve that you need figure out what you can eat less of that will make you still feel fed. Sure it doesn't apply to everyone but nothing does.

For example, for me, 600 calories worth of chips will keep me feeling fed for an hour or two. 600 calories worth of pure brisket can keep me feeing fed for 8 hours. You can guess which I tend to eat more of when I'm trying to lose weight.

edit: Also if you're at a stable weight then we're talking 10% less food per day and not 50% less.

[cycomanic]

For that to be true the base metabolic rate would need to be vastly different between individuals. While it is true that there is significant variation (according to Wikipedia more than 100%), most of that variation (60%) seems to be explained by differences in lean body mass, which is the other side of loosing weight, exercise. From those results I would argue the is little evidence that some people would have to cut dien to almost nothing while others could almost continue eating like before

[eric_cc]

> it's really not actionable advice.

It really is though. It is hard and requires discipline but it’s actionable.