[devonallie]

I find the conversation around diet extremely myopic. If the goal is to lead a long and healthy life, the minutiae around exactly when to eat or what to eat (Mediterranean diet) is so unimportant and detracts from so many other important tenets. Those being proper sleep, stress management, and exercise (cardio && strength).

That being said, if a conversation around fasting is what gets people in the door, perhaps it’s not the worst thing in the world.

[doix]

> Those being proper sleep, stress management, and exercise (cardio && strength).

And being obese impacts all those things. Sure if you are slightly overweight, then _maybe_ diet isn't at the top of the list of things to care about.

But if you are obese, suddenly sleeping well becomes harder because you are more likely to have sleep apnea. You are more likely to have low testosterone making exercise harder to recover from. Being obese means you are more likely to injure yourself when exercising as well. There's probably a link between obesity and stress as well.

All these things are linked, to dismiss diet as minutiae is not the right approach. If you are obese, you should almost definitely think about you diet and not dismiss it (among other things of course).

[killjoywashere]

In America the individual should focus about 90% of their effort on diet, and 10% on exercise. Not because the importance isn't equivalent, but because the social pressures are overwhelming fighting the individual on diet. People are happy to sell you running shoes, but even your immediate family will try to shame you into eating more.

[mathieuh]

It's the same in any western culture, and I assume every other culture that isn't going through food scarcity too. I only watch live TV when the football's on, and when you're not accustomed to it it's really overwhelming the sheer number of ads for food delivery apps.

Personally I had to vow to myself I would never use delivery apps again after I started using it almost daily, I just don't have the willpower to allow myself it every once in a while.

[killjoywashere]

Throw away your TV.

[Ensorceled]

I upvoted every comment in this chain. It's a reflection of how complicated weight and diet are in North American society right now.

[adrian_b]

All the things enumerated by you are indeed essential for a long and healthy life.

Nevertheless, none of them will prevent you to become overweight. Only controlling your diet can enable you to control your weight.

Being overweight is guaranteed to cause health problems, especially at an old age. For example, my father could not take a certain cancer medication that had very good chances to prolong his life by 4 or 5 years, because he was too overweight. He also had a type of renal cancer that appears much more frequently at overweight men.

For most people, exercise can prevent gaining weight with a poor diet only when it is done during many hours every day, which is something that only professional athletes or movie stars can afford to do.

An adequate diet will prevent gaining weight even in a couch potato.

I have verified this in my personal experience, because I have been overweight during many years, despite doing a lot of exercise.

Only after I have altered my diet and I have begun to measure the amounts of everything I eat, I was able to return to an appropriate weight. Now I can increase or decrease my weight at will to reach any desired value, regardless if I also exercise or not.

[horstmeyer]

Yeah, diet is at least 70% and exercise at most 30%. Unfortunately.

[gubernation]

If you come down with some severe health issue from mildly starving yourself for many years you will never attribute it to the starvation. That's part of why anecdotal success stories are mostly worthless, they're laden with agenda and unfalsifiable.

[adrian_b]

Starvation is never necessary for weight control.

This is why there exist official recommendations for an adequate daily intake for proteins, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, for anyone to be able to plan a diet that does not lead to starvation.

Experiments on humans are difficult, so it is not known with accuracy which are the best daily intakes. For example some believe that a daily intake of 0.8 g of proteins per kg is enough, while others believe that a daily intake of 1.2 g/kg would be better.

Even when choosing the maximum daily intakes for all essential nutrients that anyone believes to be adequate, the corresponding energy intake is much less than needed by a human.

So the control of the weight can be done by adjusting only the daily intake of carbohydrates and/or fat that are eaten additionally to a diet that is complete for the other nutrients.

When the daily intake of energy is less than necessary for maintaining the current body weight, one will be hungry all the time, but with an adequate diet there is no starvation that could cause health issues.

Just skipping over meals, without a plan of how to ensure that you eat enough of what matters, could cause real starvation and health issues.

[gubernation]

Amazing response, thank you. This really opened my eyes, I might try IF/TRE now.

[heresie-dabord]

> if a conversation around fasting is what gets people in the door

Obesity is an epidemic in the US.[1] A direct and practical culture-change about food consumption is urgently needed.

Overeating is generally encouraged socially and in advertising. People are literally crippling themselves with fat.

Once the overconsumption of calories is corrected, a person can start exercising to achieve all the benefits of regular activity.

[1] _ https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

[fastball]

How is diet any more "myopic" than the other things you listed?

[bravura]

"If the goal is to lead a long and healthy life," then an active lifestyle with good sleep and stress management as described by GP means you begin tuning into your body much more. This increased body and mood awareness in turn precipitates a healthy diet that actually works for your body and supports your exercise regimen and healthy lifestyle.

If you just diet but at not active or sleeping well or are stressed, you are not necessarily leading to a long and healthy life. Perhaps weight loss, but not the stated goal of a long and healthy life.

[lm28469]

Has it been studied though ?

Moderate exercise + perfect diet VS lots of exercise and junk diet ?

imho diet is as important as the rest, you can't be healthy eating mcdonalds everyday no matter how much you lift.

[bravura]

I’m not talking about moderate vs vigorous exercise. Check my comment. I’m talking about exercise AND sleep/recovery AND stress. Ie a 360 view on your current mental and physical health.

What I’m saying is that if you are thoughtful about exercise, sleep, and stress, then you will be paying attention to your mood and energy level. And thus you will notice that eating junk food has detrimental effects on your mood and energy level.

People tend to follow diets blindly, and sometimes pure weightlifting routines, but rarely do people blithely exercise, manage sleep, and track stress without increased awareness of what effect diet has on them.

I’ll ask in return: let’s say you have a great diet and do yoga twice a week, but you are constantly sleep deprived and high cortisol from stress, does that lead to a long and healthy life?

[agumonkey]

And I have a strong belief that many things fall into place by themselves as soon as you change lifestyle. Do more physical activity, you're gonna eat less and better, digest better, less constant snack/sweet, better regularity in when you eat, etc etc

[bearmode]

Diet is far more important than sleep, stress management, or exercise for weight loss. Which most people who are dieting are trying to achieve.

[jimkleiber]

I like what you've said and would add hydration to it. I think so often I eat when I'm actually just thirsty.

[godshatter]

This was a big takeaway for me when I started intermittent fasting. A lot of what I thought was hunger is actually thirst. The other big takeaway was noticing that when hunger pangs would come around at the normal times I used to eat, just drinking something and ignoring them for a few minutes would cause them to go away.

[TimSchumann]

This is most of fasting, once you’re past the withdrawal.

[seydor]

I dont know, it seems to me that what you add to your body is more important than how you use it. Body has its own homeostasis , but food is external stimulus. Plus, the timing of eating is a way to manage the physical exercise of your gut muscles and the diurnal/sleep cycle

[ddorian43]

There are people who claim to have life-changing results from fixing their diet. An extreme example is fixing/improving epilepsy with medical-keto-diet. Or fixing type-2 diabet with keto/carnivore, etc.

[pessimizer]

> I find the conversation around diet extremely myopic. If the goal is to lead a long and healthy life, the minutiae around exactly when to eat or what to eat (Mediterranean diet) is so unimportant and detracts from so many other important tenets. Those being proper sleep, stress management, and exercise (cardio && strength).

Are you saying that nutrition scientists should ignore diet, and concentrate on the random things in other fields that you find important?

[anon84873628]

People do talk about all those other things. And talking about diet is not myopic when most people's diet is so poor and unhealthy.

[lm28469]

> Those being proper sleep, stress management, and exercise (cardio && strength).

And eating properly...

[fjabre]

The goal is happiness. No one cares to live a long time being healthy if they are miserable.

[throwaway289943]

Yeah, it's not exactly uncharted territory, people spend way too much time on experimenting with fads. And regardless of diet, you still need cardio and strength, and also flexibility training, to keep your body in shape. Even if you find magic shortcut diet to be totally shredded while sitting on your ass, your body is still going to start malfunctioning because of atrophy and stiffness and cardiovascular issues. The best thing to do by far, is adding more varied forms of exercise, but it takes a lot of time, that's the problem..

[grvdrm]

And that’s where you have to be quite deliberate. Plan out a part of your day to exercise. Don’t disrupt unless it is critical to do so.

Very easy to say “but I was so busy” and not do it, but sticking to a consistent schedule is how the habit (exercise) forms.

[throwaway289943]

Yeah, the biggest limiting factor by far is time, once you get over the issue of motivation/discipline. I bet the optimal thing to do for general health and longevity, is to do light/medium intensity, low impact/risk, exercise of varied sort, for most of your waking hours.

[nradov]

I don't believe that time is really the limiting factor for most middle-class people. It's more a matter of priorities. Most of us spend a lot of time watching TV and scrolling social media.

[grvdrm]

Exactly, I think this is people saying "I'm too busy." But the reality is that they're "busy" by simply prioritizing other things that may or may not be worth it.

Examples I see all the time: excessive phone time (all activities there), stuffing too many things into one day and subsequently completing only a small portion of those things, distractions at work (non-work web sites), etc.

There are good reasons to use your phone, have a big to-do list, and etc. But it's also easier than you think to schedule 45 mins into your day to power through a fitness activity.

I personally think running/jogging is a top activity in terms of value for your time. Burns calories, improves cardio, the list goes on...