The problem was not that we didn’t know what to do ("eat less"), but to enable that solution.
Exercising is great, absolutely, but eating less is the actual primary method. While acknowledging complications of metabolism and psychology and weird states body goes through when it's hungry, primary part is to reduce calory intake vs expenditure.
So as snide and silly as it may be, in my neck of the woods, I would agree, lots of people don't believe eating less is the primary method of losing weight.
A bag of doritos is 200+ calories. The exercise involved to burn that off is running or walking multiple miles. It’s way easier in terms of physical expenditure to just not eat the doritos, or skip the sugary soda.
Not eating as much takes much less of your busy day.
so long as you can live like a monk and hit the gym every night for a few months it's pretty good. this is dependent on you being able to stand being hungry and cranky and going to bed exhausted for all that time though
Stuff you can do for a week doesn’t automatically extend to maintaining that over the next 50 years.
I am sure that when I've lost weight it's more the portion control than the exercise - but the exercise is a critical component. When you go from being sedentary to doing even casual exercise you feel better and get more energy - which you can then use to be more active. Without some kind of virtuous lifestyle-change cycle you are likely not going to shift your body mass, kind of no matter what ultimately puts you over the edge.
I was with a girl that barely ate, and couldn't get her weight down for about a decade because of that. Eventually she got really excited about a local dance studio and suddenly her weight dropped like a rock. She had to exercise more, but that was miserable until she found exercise that was effective and actually clicked, then it was trivial
Meanwhile it was trivial for me to eat less, because my budget should be around 1800 calories a day, and I was eating 3000. It's easy to cut out an entire bag of doritos. It is less easy to literally starve yourself.
People seem to forget as well that when you cut calories, your body will scream bloody murder until it re-adjusts. My body was convinced I was starving while I was 50 pounds overweight and eating 2000 calories because I had previously eaten more. Your body did not evolve in an environment where that was ever the wrong thing to feel! "Please eat more or we die" is one of the most powerful biological signals.
That these medications cut that signal is entirely why they work! If people just "couldn't stop eating" then not having hunger or appetite signals wouldn't have worked either.
Average woman may have TDEE around 1800-2000, she can eat 1700-1600kcal comfortably.
You know that if i remove 150kcal from your diet, your wouldn't notice? that's like 2 slices of bread. So the hunger suppression will never be a question for vast majority of fat people
150kcal deficit over a year = 7.1kg or 15.6 lbs lost! and 300kcal = 31.2lbs or 14.2kg!! all this without any injection or drug without any exercise or severe loss of lean masss
As soon as the diet requires cutting out a daily meal or changing the contents of meals in really harsh ways (like no bread) it's going to get on your nerves and make you neurotic.
When the body does not scream that murder, it is called anorexia. And it is much worst for your health then obesity.
Exercise can also absolutely increase base metabolic rate leading to weight loss; you still have to put up with a calorie deficit, which is the hardest part of losing weight, but you won't need to change your actual eating habits as much, which can make the social aspect easier.
None of this changes the basic thermodynamics and reality that to lose weight a calorie deficit is absolutely necessary and that calorie intake is by far the more significant lever available (compared to expenditure), of course -- but again, I personally basically never see anyone dispute this, whereas I regularly see people in the "just eat less, fatty" camp gloss over or misconstrue these nuances as though acknowledging them constitutes a denial of CICO in the strict sense.
It certainly works, it is just an unhelpful strategy.
Am I spending loads on unused subscriptions or take out each month? Maybe reduce it. Or, I'm pinching pennies and could benefit with polishing my resume'/gaining certificates and applying for better jobs for the next undefined period of time.
As with food. With the caveat that you are tracking calorie intake and burn, not "food" intake and burn, volume and 'fill' aren't 1:1
Fasting does too, for that matter.
Paleo is just trendy keto with some woo on top.
The don't use the same mechanism as glp, nor do they have same success rate, but similar idea.
Eliminating sugar makes it harder to consume a 64oz soda at 800 calories in 3 minutes and still be hungry.
Anywho, most diets achieve some weight-loss.
But! keeping your mind and body from demanding you eat more to return to homeostasis is actually the 2nd hard part, and the part that most people fail at. And we'll see how much glp losses are sustainable (without shots) here pretty soon.
Regardless, this technology is good and we should subsidize everyone getting to a healthy weight. Searching for reasons they are actually morally inferior or stupid is counterproductive.
So maybe the goal is use the drugs to shift your lifestyle to eating less, having less food in the house, and being more active and then wean off it
I’ve lost weight many times, maintained the weight loss for long periods of time, but I’m just constantly hungry throughout. It never gets any easier. I’m physically just very hungry - my belly is constantly rumbling to the point that people comment on it, and I get the weird sizzling noise in the back of my neck. I’ll maintain this - for years sometimes - but eventually, like almost everyone who loses weight, something inevitably happens and I fall off the wagon.
I’m on the drugs now and all the grumbling and side effects of being hungry have gone away. Even the ones like being tired, getting sick all the time and having thinning wiry grey hair, which would happen in the past whenever I cut back food.
the lifestyle habit and stuff to me is eating the same thing every morning or getting used to falling asleep hungry, those kind of adjustments. doesn't mean you get less hungry eventually
and then if anything changes (move, new job, new friends start coming over more and you want to be social) you'll fall out of the habits naturally. you can only do it as long as you can do it
Deficit and hence suffering no longer applies; you continue eating at maintenance, which is very comfortable.
Will we?
The idea is to be on them for life; I don't know that I've seen anyone recommend differently.
People who do keto, paleo, eliminating sugar, vegan or whatnot do this as a strategy for eating less, through a variety of mechanisms, generally some combination of attempting to stabilize blood sugar to forestay cravings, eating fewer meals, or eating less calorie dense foods (you have to eat a lot of vegetables to get fat!)
A deficit so small that most users won't even know that they are at deficit!
You know that if i remove 150kcal from your diet, your wouldn't notice? that's like 2 slices of bread. So the hunger suppression will never be a question for vast majority of fat people
150kcal deficit over a year = 7.1kg or 15.6 lbs lost! and 300kcal = 31.2lbs or 14.2kg!! all this without any injection or drug without any exercise or severe loss of lean masss
Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.
And as a bonus, now they also have one. A lot of people didn't even believe that was the solution though, and the belief change is important.
The real solution to weight loss (especially in the U.S.) is to change the social norms. When everyone is hitting the buffets and going to Cheesecake Factory and buying high calorie garbage at a discount, of course to population gets fat. France, for example, makes all of that much harder. Maybe Ozempic will help reduce the Walmart-wheelchair-fat population, but truly becoming fit as a country requires significantly more friction for everyone.
It's funny how a buffet in almost every other country really just exists for the self-serving simplicity/cost-savings and a broad-ish selection for customers, not to trigger overeating.
It’s a real shame it was literally killing me the whole time.
Tobacco consumption still causes about one of every five deaths in the United States each year (439k). That number won't start going down (due to alternatives) until 2030, according to AJPM. Phillip Morris ($PM) is near an all time high, despite killing millions.
It killed both my grandfathers, it's likely killed someone you knew and loved, please get your facts straight.
And on your other point, fat people already get a lot of social 'friction', from people exactly like you who call them 'people of walmart' who eat 'garbage'.
A fat person who has exercised more and eaten less than you, and lost weight every day for a year will still be called a 'lazy fat-ass' by a person like you until they actually reach the promised land of 'normal'. (and before you ask to invalidate my opinion. No, I am not fat).
On France, Paris is a delightfully walkable city. US cities are car-or-else (excepting NYC). We're the ones who made our people sedentary.
You are on HN, most people here are hacking the attention economy to keep people seated and glued to screens.
Are you willing to vote to give up your car and a part of your future compensation to be surrounded by fitter people?
The social changes you have imagined are forms of shame/intolerance maximization (governments should not do this!), rather than designing our world around good food, human movement, and healthy habits (a thing governments can and should do!)
Regardless, GLPs are an absolute win, and once most people are a healthy weight I hope you will dial back on you reflexive disdain.
Not everyone knows this and many who do can't afford an expensive farm to table whole foods diet.
Now toss in car culture and the suburban model and a culture very strongly against any sort of socialized commons like public trans and the little exercise they otherwise would get isn't available anymore. I live in a walkable neighborhood and take public trans, I know my health would be much worse if I didn't get all those steps, fresh air, sense of community, etc in everyday.
Pretty much everything Americans do is wrong when it comes to food, diet, walkable communities, and transportation. What we need to fix this is not putting everyone on ozempic, but a frank look at how our society is organized and figuring out ways to move to a saner society.
The success of GLP-1 is based on the fact that the patient can eat less without suffering. No food noise, reduced feelings of hunger, smaller stomach capacity.
Saying that the platitude works is like saying that "just stop doing fentanyl" is the recipe to solve the fentanyl crisis in the US.
Suffering comes not from "dieting" but from not knowing calorie math and using too big of a deficit!
Run too big of a deficit = become miserable = blame dieting and stop halfway. Simply pick a deficit you can continue for long; it's the solution! Average woman may have TDEE around 1800-2000, she can eat 1700-1600kcal comfortably.
You know that if i remove 150kcal from your diet, your wouldn't notice? that's like 2 slices of bread. So the hunger suppression will never be a question for vast majority of fat people
150kcal deficit over a year = 7.1kg or 15.6 lbs lost! and 300kcal = 31.2lbs or 14.2kg!! all this without any injection or drug without any exercise or severe loss of lean masss
To me personally, the drug proved that people really ARE special cases.
Before Ozempic, I lost about 80 pounds "naturally", by suffering immensely, then kept it off for years, again by suffering immensely. Every day, hunger was at the forefront of my mind all day, every day. It was the #1 concern in my life.
I eventually gained back about 40 pounds, then went on Ozempic.
It has been an eye opener because I now realize what it's like to not suffer from hunger. I realized for the first time that this is how "normal" people feel, all the time! The only way I could get fat now is by eating junk - so in a weird way I started to understand the judgement about being fat.
Some people are just "calibrated" correctly, and that was absolutely mind blowing to me.
Very few people accept that maybe there is a flaw in their dieting. There are experienced people who study this stuff for years; how can I, as a newbie, learn all this in a short period of time, fail, and claim that dieting doesn't work?
I just started on a GLP-1, and it has already been an interesting lesson in the subjective nature of food drives and hunger.
I've heard for literally years the advice "just drink some water it will trick you into feeling less hungry".
And I've always suspected this was some bullshit placebo, because that OBVIOUSLY doesn't work (so I thought). Water doesn't replace food, it just fills up your stomach so that eating becomes somewhat more unpleasant. But the food/hunger drive is still there unabated.
Well, except after taking a GLP-1 I actually experienced the sensation of drinking something and having my hunger go down. Whatever that circuit is, it has been broken in me for at least my entire adult life. So giving me that advice had been like trying to explain the color to a blind person.
Which, oddly, ties a lot more into the subject title than the example the author gave...
This is precisely the thing that cannot be put aside without making the solution much less useful / efficient / solution-esque.
What's more annoying is claiming all fat people have a common thinking pattern.
Some fat people may think about food all time, but most don't.
Discussion about it in news, conversations would get it mixed up into stories of genetics, free will, macronutrient balance, personal identities, culture etc. Call it nuance; complexity, or bullshit. People had/have a hard time accepting "eat less to not be fat".
This is one of the things you actually can change about your body, appearance and health outcomes! There are many things that are immutable - people would try to convince you the biggest mutable thing is also out of reach.
It's kind of like saying "Smoke less to avoid lung cancer". You can say eating is a fatal addiction. If you stop you die. The hard part is is balancing it so you keep on living and avoid the negative health outcomes.
Why is this hard? First the cause and effect are separated by a lot of time. If I eat a sweet fat sugary treat I get the good feeling RIGHT NOW. The negative health effects are way later.
Other reasons it's hard is our eating habits are mostly created in our childhood and very hard to break as an adult. If your parents fed you poorly you're at a significant health disadvantage.
The last one I'll list is crap food marketing. The most unhealthy crap seems to have the brightest packages to catch our eye. It has huge amounts of salt, fat, and sugar, things our evolutionary body craves because the number one thing it wants to avoid is starvation.
So yea, it is reachable, but it is not trivial at all.
I mean, we've been telling people "eat less" for literally decades and Americans are fatter than ever. The only thing that finally brought down societal-wide obesity stats was GLP-1s.
Many people don’t understand what the high calorie drivers in their diet are, many wildly mis-estimate how much they’re eating, most people inflate the weight loss impacts of training and neglect the appetite rebounds, and the interplay between insulin and appetite and how to manage satiety signals is voodoo for even a lot of doctors. Availability of proper food and time to prepare it are hurdles on top of hurdles.
My estimation is that a lot of people are using way, way, more energy and willpower in their ‘diet’ cycles than necessary but tragically getting poor results because of miscalibration. Our society is geared around profitable food delivery, not healthy dietary wisdom.
The mind is always the biggest battle
Any means of positive metabolic change is fine, but some are better than others. Ozempic is definitely on the lower tiers of success because the body recomp and more meaningful habits never happen.
Obviously there are dozens of completely legitimate social and physiological complicating factors, but at the end of the day, you are what you eat; but there is a certain segment of the population who refuses to believe it. They hold sacred the food they consume and the weight they gain.
1. Different bodies have different abilities to digest different things. For example, you could eat every bit as much grass as a cow that's gaining weight, and you would lose weight (and eventually starve to death). Obviously the variation within humans is less than that between humans and cows, but it's silly to pretend that we all share identical gut biomes and identical abilities to process foods with the same efficiencies. From this, it clearly follows that some people are going to get more calories out of the same food than others.
2. Even ignoring inclination to exercise, people have different resting heart rates and body temperatures. It obviously costs more calories to heat your body to a higher temperature and for your heart to beat faster, so some people are naturally going to gain or lose weight at a caloric intake that keeps other people at the same weight.
You can argue that these differences are minor, at the margins, and unlikely to mean the difference between equilibrium and weight change, and you might be right, but it's silly to pretend that they're physically impossible because of thermodynamics. The human stomach isn't a bomb calorimeter, which is why you can't drink a liter of gasoline and skip eating for a few days.
Similarly, a calorie deficit is the biggest driver, and it dwarfs all these other factors you listed.
When carbs spike their blood sugar, insulin swoops in to convert the excess glucose into fat. When they try to restrict calories, they focus on cutting the wrong macros. Calories from carbs are hard to avoid and easily miscounted/underestimated unless you're literally weighing the food and know every ingredient used.
You're not even wrong that women are more likely to have a sweet tooth and fall for crap diets like "low fat" or "plant based". It's decades of evil marketing at play here. The result is not only that they stay fat, but then lose muscle and the number on the scale doesn't budge.
You know what's a whole lot easier to eyeball and get full on? Meat and veg you cooked yourself. That's the easiest solution by miles, but people will continue serving themselves way too much pasta and bread (because it looks right on the plate), adding sauces that are smuggling even more carbs, eating ultraprocessed junk loaded with sugar you can't even taste or filler carbs to cut production cost, and saying their occasional piece of "fun size" candy or favorite drink "doesn't count".
But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.
War and famine? And no Haber-Bosch process.
Ah yes, our old friend starvation.
> because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives
...somehow makes me picture you saying it with a smug expression and instantly dislike the whole comment. Maybe it's the broad, catch-all "because people" generalisation, I don't know. But again, I agree with the comment... in meaning ;(
The issue there, is that for every "successful" person, there are thousads who did the exact same things and didn't make it. Arguably a better thing would be to interview the ones who failed, and learn lessons from them.
Secondly, the person themselves can be selective in what they share, they may talk about the risks they took to get where they are, but not about the backstop of a wealthy family to fall back on if it all goes wrong (for example).
Saying “it’s all just luck” is just a defensive mechanism, in a lot of ways.
There you go, I just made life much simpler for you.
There is an interesting effect in weight loss, but it applies to so many more things. That is when a lot of people diet they record particular things like how much they ate at a meal, but not how much they snacked. When you have a third party observer record everything that observer gets a much different calorie intake amount than the person dieting.
This is also true for almost any human claim that is not backed up by outside observation. We do all kinds of things subconsciously. We cut out any information that may look bad. The words we say have huge amounts of assumptions build in for 'us' but may not apply to anyone else on the planet. This is why science quite commonly finds reality is in direct opposition to how our minds think it works.
I honestly think this is some fundamental limit of single observer based intelligence.
"I tell people not to listen to too much advice. Listening to advice from other people should be approached with great caution ..." [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/L_Guz73e6fw?si=J7iKIBd5h9Avdu5S&t=8329 (timestamped)
You solve the credibility problem (they ended up successful) while still distilling down the more valuable failures.
The most informative are rigorous population studies. Unfortunately, those tend to reach depressing and not necessarily useful conclusions like "the most likely way to achieve wealth is to have successful parents."
I had trouble with university the first time around, but it wasn't for the stuff that I thought was interesting. I did fine in my math classes and physics courses and the like; the thing that I struggled the most with were my "easy" courses (e.g. multicultural film). I just did not care about anything that wasn't math or computers, and as such I had trouble forcing myself to do the homework or study and of course I did poorly in the courses.
I've gotten a lot better at forcing myself to do boring work now, but ironically once I decided to do grad school and get my masters, I found it a lot easier. I didn't have to do any courses that I thought were boring. I got to focus on data structures and math and programming languages. You know, fun stuff! As such the masters was (comparatively speaking) a breeze for me because I didn't mind spending hours studying every day.
It occurs to me, though, that this advice might just be about me specifically, which I suppose is the point of the article.
Taught me that I'm just not well tuned for academics or pure research. I'm extrinsically motivated, I need a real-world problem to anchor to, and if that problem requires me to learn Brainfuck then I'll enthusiastically learn Brainfuck, but I would never learn Brainfuck for fun.
Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.
I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.
Just offering the perspective from someone for whom grad school (or at least my taste of it) was more difficult in aggregate. I'm glad people like you exist, for all the time you waste navel gazing you occasionally stumble across something incredibly useful that people like me would probably never find. :)
- It's contextual to the advice giver: Is it specific to them? Do they have an ulterior motive or are beholden to someone with an ulterior motive, e.g. getting you to support their agenda or getting you to buy or vote.
- It's contextual to you: Does that fit the way you operate? Does it play to your strengths?
- And it's contextual to your ...well... context: Are you in a country where this advice applies? Do you have the financial means to execute on it, etc...
Bottom line - there are very few pieces of truly universal good advice.
What do you think such advice could be/is and the definition of finding such advice and to differentiating it from other advice which is still contextual?
That means: secure a basic level of subsistence that allows you to keep trying, then focus on repeated attempts at activities that can scale exponentially. Think of writing a book, building a SaaS product, or recording a song: things you can sell repeatedly at little or no additional cost, rather than selling your time or labor.
This is equally good advice for an aspiring Punjabi musician in the slums of Lahore and a hopeful software founder at Stanford.
It may not be right for you, but you'll have made a better decision for having considered it.
An interviewer is really asking "how do you recommend people replicate your success?" which grounds the response in the hard lessons that person learned on their own journey.
Personalized advice can be equally useless, but if that person really understands you and your situation you might be surprised how specific and valuable good objective feedback can be.
There are things that can work, and things that likely won't work, and most people know these. Then there is a space of things that usually work and things that may not work, and you can't fit these into a person without knowing a lot of variables about them and the environment around them, like what and who they know, their personality, their competence (not just their resume), and many, many other variables. So advice defaults to guessing most of these variables to find some direction.
And I think it boosts advisors' ego, makes advisees feel temporarily better, even motivated, but YMMV by a lot.
This is why the good advisors also change the variables in your favor, like introduce you to their network, coach, etc. And often this costs you something. Like money, equity, whatever.
Or "playing the fiddle for a cow" (though we know some animals can appreciate music in some way)
The point being that advice depends on the listener's capacity to understand the intent of the advisor.
- Cousin Stizz
Don’t value the experiences of others over your own.
You’ll end up in a never ending loop of trying to change instead of working on your own path.
People largely don’t give a crap about you.
For myself I had to leave my hometown to be happy. And like that everything was easier. I had an amazing partner and a better commute.
You don’t need to validate yourself vs the opinions of others.
Eh, this is kind of messy. There are some people that have lived objectively bad lives. Horrible parents, terrible abuse, no education, etc. These kinds of lives can easily lead to traps of "the world is shit, don't even try". Worse you've only ever been taught detrimental things, so your own advice/experience is bad.
Really easy to end up in generational traps this way.
You have a right to your trauma after all.
I think this idea can be expanded on, and it is to separate the merits of the idea from the delivery of the idea. I see this frequently with: - neurodivergent people (of whatever variety) - ESL speakers - cultural clashes (eg Dutch / American meetings)
If you can separate delivery and the merits of a discussion, you can benefit both ways -- taking a skeptical view on the best pitches (eg from anyone on a Forbes 30 for 30 list) and an optimistic view on the worst.
AIs do not have all the contexts about you thus provide you guidance not fit for you. Advisors are the same, they don't know everything about you thus not all advices fit for you.
You know about yourself the best (given you "reflect") and make trade-offs between what you know, and what you consider benficial to you.
As I always bring up about making tradeoffs in HN in my comments, the article is solid.
When you want money, ask for advice.
Everything OP said though still applies, figure it out for yourself.
It's easy to think your experience encompasses all of "software" and give definitive advice to others who work in a vastly different space than you do.
The advice is: Work very hard on something, and you too might get lucky.
Jobs' version is just slightly modified: Work very hard on something (you care about), and you too might get lucky.
Still not sure how to do that...
This is oddly evident in beginner influencers trying to become gurus on social media. They try to write life advice from a position of superiority, but when you look closely they’re given themselves a little pep talk about how they want to be or what they need to hear. It doesn’t mean the advice is wrong, but you can see through the illusion that you’re hearing sage advice from someone who figured it all out long ago.
In what way are they opposing thoughts? Steve Jobs said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. Mark Cuban also said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. The exact word choice may have differed, but they both expressed the exact same thing.
Perhaps you can interpret Jobs' statement that way in a vacuum, but fortunately we don't need to evaluate what Jobs' said in a vacuum. He also said a lot of other things that allow us to build up context around his intent. He spoke a lot about how he found his love.