[heavyset_go]

> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it.

Learn to cook well so that eating out would result in lower quality meals compared to what you could make yourself.

Once you're controlling what goes into your meals, instead of outsourcing it, that makes it easier to control portion sizes, how much fat/oils go into things (I've found that restaurant dishes have an absurd amount of fat in them even when eating at "good" places), how things are sweetened, what you can use as healthier substitutes and what not.

You can eliminate almost all sugars with low to zero calorie substitutes, you can replace bread/panko/etc with low-carb flours, if you're frying you don't need more than a teaspoon of cooking oil, many sauces you can learn to make yourself instead of buying corn syrup and soybean oil-laden sauces from stores, etc.

Make it a rule to not buy things that come in boxes, buy fresh or flash frozen ingredients and make things from scratch. Stay in the produce, meat and fish sections of the store and ignore everything else outside of things like spices, frozen vegetables and protein.

Give yourself some leeway, too. You don't want to go into an all-or-nothing mindset, because that might lead you to giving up on eating healthily altogether if you break your diet. If you can find a way to treat yourself with something healthy that you like, that would be great. Sometimes I crave pancakes, despite them being nearly 100% carbohydrates. I eventually ended up with a recipe that substitutes wheat flour with almond and coconut flour, and to replace the syrup, a berry sauce reduction sweetened with erythritol. Barely any carbohydrates and the berry sauce is better than maple syrup, IMO, and goes with a lot of different meals.

tldr: reduce the opportunities to eat unhealthily, and increase the opportunities to eat healthily, even if you don't take those opportunities all of the time.

[etothepii]

There's a lot of words here so you took some time to write this.

Who is it for?

Why do you think this is a new/novel idea the person you are replying to, and others reading it, has/have not heard before?

[le-mark]

Indeed!

> Sometimes I crave pancakes, despite them being nearly 100% carbohydrates. I eventually ended up with a recipe that substitutes wheat flour with almond and coconut flour, and to replace the syrup, a berry sauce reduction sweetened with erythritol. Barely any carbohydrates and the berry sauce is better than maple syrup,

This reads like an elaborate troll, at that!

[heavyset_go]

I'm really just that cringey IRL.

[heavyset_go]

I am sorry that my post bothered you, I will keep your sensibilities in mind the next time I choose to share personal experiences on HN.

[jallen_dot_dev]

I'll take a wild guess and say it's for those who "cannot fathom how people [eat healthy]."

[heavyset_go]

You got it.

[astrange]

“Has a high amount of fat” isn’t the same thing as “unhealthy”. “Has a high amount of calories” isn’t either.

Wanting to lose weight isn’t necessarily about health, and eating a lot of fat is an effective way to lose weight.

[heavyset_go]

Eating a lot of fat is an effective way to lose weight, I agree.

However the fats used in restaurants are often used for frying, and likely have been used repeatedly for many hours. Oils used for frying can quickly produce compounds that are not great to consume, like various aldehydes, VOCs, free radicals etc[1]. If they've been used for hours, the chances of those compounds being in your food are high.

They are often low quality, as well, like soybean oils that can be high in fats that can be unhealthy in excess and might contribute to CVD.

I bring up the fat thing not because I think fats are the reason why people gain weight, I'm well aware of how high fat low carb diets are effective. I bring it up because restaurants often put fats into food you might not put it in at home, and the food can soak a lot of it up, turning what might be a 500 calorie dish into something that's 1200 calories or more. If you're trying to watch what you eat, eating out can make that hard because you don't know exactly how much food you're actually eating, and you can't really rely on nutritional breakdowns you might find online or from the establishments themselves.

The foods the fats are in also seem to be high in carbohydrates, which isn't great for ketosis.

I also bring it up because of Ulillillia's decision to degrease the pizzas that were the only thing he ate. By doing that he was able to lose weight while literally only eating pizza for every meal for years.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32818910