I think the whole point of the article is that you don't need to do anything crazy to lose weight or be healthy, you really just have to eat healthier foods and move around more in general. A lot of people think a diet is this magical thing that makes it easy for you, but the truth is that it ultimately comes down to choosing foods that are good for you, rather than taking diet pills or doing some extreme diet like keto or carnivore. And that can be _hard_, because eating good food and being lazy are very easy to do and can be quite enjoyable.
>you really just have to eat healthier foods and move around more in general.
Actually it's even more simple. You don't need to eat healthier or move around more. You simply need to consume approx 100-150 calories less than you burn per day (BMR + additional activities).
If you do this, you will lose weight whether you get all those calories from only burgers or from lean chicken salad.
It's simple in a very reductionist sense. In reality this is likely to either not work or to not be optimal.
The first problem with that simple math is that calorie counts on packaging can be off by a substantial amount. In the United States, the FDA allows calorie counts on packaging to be as inaccurate as 20%.
This doesn't mean all foods are going to deviate by 20% but that potential is there, and even around a 7% over or underestimation can still be a big deal if you're really going to be bean-counting calories to such an extent.
Good luck accurately determining your individual BMR with a simple calculator (Harris-Benedict formula) or your TDEE. Those formulae can be off by hundreds of calories, and are likely to be even less accurate the more obese a person is.
> If you do this, you will lose weight whether you get all those calories from only burgers or from lean chicken salad.
If, hypothetically, someone drinks milkshakes day in and day out, a 150 calorie TDEE deficit is going to be meaningless.
Energy substrates aren't equivalent. Every macro, and even different molecules have their own metabolic pathways and the body utilizes them in very different ways.
Just because directly calculating your exact calorie balance is untenable, doesn't mean you can't make intentional relative adjustments to it. Even if it does sometimes take a few tries to make work ("oh, eating less made me tired and cranky, let's try it this other way").
> Just because directly calculating your exact calorie balance is untenable
It's not only untenable, it's infeasible. The only way to "directly" calculate one's energy expenditure is to either place them inside a direct calorimeter or to use respiratory gas analysis, and to adhere to very strict protocols. And no, fitness bands and watches are not accurate enough to overcome the margin of error.
Sure, one can keep lowering the amount of food they eat until they get some kind of result from it. In that case, there's almost no point in trying any sort of BMR calculation flim-flam whatsoever. They'd be better off just eyeballing how much they eat and reducing the volume and the frequency.
Regardless, my point stands. Suggesting that the answer is to "simply" intake ~150 fewer calories of energy per day is to suggest that the vast majority of people are equipped with the skills and knowledge to even get close to that kind of accuracy in any sort of calculation. Maybe one can get lucky and see results from such a "simple" calculation because of their individual biology and eating habits, but the margin of error is still very high.
Let's set aside reality for a moment and pretend that calorie counts on packaging were perfectly accurate and that the Harris-Benedict equation works perfectly for everyone. That still wouldn't matter the inference of calories of food are/were measured as heat in a bomb calorimeter (i.e. setting food on fire and recording how much heat is emitted). The calorie count that appears on a food package is a guess based on the composition of macronutrients. With the exception of fiber, the calories of fat, protein, and carbs are combined together to form the single count based on how they typically burn in a calorimeter. This introduces more inaccuracy depending on the type of fiber since it may be fermented into digestible substrate.
The human body is nothing like a bomb calorimeter. It treats different forms of energy differently, and different forms of energy are utilized to varying amounts, and are even utilized differently in the presence of one another. If you take a dump, let it dry and then light it on fire, it will burn because there's excess energy being passed through and not converted to heat by the body. Food may pass faster or slower depending on what it's composed of. Fiber can not only do that but also prevent the digestion of nutrients. A diet that mixes lots of fat and carbs together facilitates the storage of more energy as fat than if either of them were eaten in isolation. Protein has more of a thermic effect (the body emitting more heat) than either carbs or fat.
Point being, if one really does not want to lose weight by actually choosing to eat foods that are appropriate for their digestive system, or to eat food that is low in energy density (ex. leafy greens), then they might as well cut down on food to such an extent that they would be able to notice it without punching numbers into a calculator. A substantial amount would have to be reduced from the diet to have a reasonable amount of confidence that one is indeed eating less energy than the body is expending in a day.
In the capacity of losing weight, the requirement is caloric restriction, irrespective of whether the food intake is healthy or not. Healthy food, however, facilitates the process, because fiber and protein, and lower insulin responses from sugar restriction, improves satiety and cravings.
Coming from a standard westernized diet high in processed foods, you'll probably lose some weight just by changing makeup of diet, but if you're overweight you won't lose all of the excess without sustained caloric restriction.
That is definitelly NOT the truth. The "advice" is so non actionable that one doesn't know where to start - what is "good" food? you never take pills? Move around more in general? How much more? All day or every minute counts?...
The comments like this are just noise from the folks that probably never had an issue with those stuff.
Exactly. And what most people tend to think is "healthy" is not based on sound science of any kind. These questions you ask are important because one can't take something like diet and exercise and treat them in a reductive sense.
One can lose weight by eating nothing but plant leaves. Is that "good" food or a "good" diet? Such a diet would be unsustainable in the long run simply because said food is neither dense enough in energy nor dense enough in nutrients. That doesn't sound particularly good to me. But many people equate salad to being "healthy", such that they will add lettuce to the things they actually want to eat because of a mystical believe that plant material is inherently good.
People like to reduce it to 2 binary things as usual, but there is nothing simple or easy or cheap about maintaining your health. Its extremely hard.
You need to measure things yourself all the time, know a lot of theory, and experiment a lot, because due to bio-individuality you can extrapolate from other people findings in a limited manner.
I'll give the article credit for mentioning processed foods, but otherwise, many people and even experts disagree on what makes a food healthy. Telling people to just not "eat crap" and to cut out processed and fried foods is barely specific enough to be useful.
The utility of eating a specific diet is that it actually identifies what foods should be avoided and why. If uneducated individuals just "eat healthy", they are likely to do things that either won't work or will backfire in the long run.
> A lot of people think a diet is this magical thing that makes it easy for you
Yes, because that's what an appropriate diet tends to do. When you eat a diet that doesn't overly engage the Randle cycle or raise insulin, losing body fat usually follows whether one counts their calories or not. If someone is overweight and they eat a low insulinogenic diet, and their food is satiating, both their eating frequency and their biology is likely to shift to not hold on to so much body fat anymore. The only thing that's not easy about such a diet is not being tempted by all the common foods that interfere with the metabolism.
> you really just have to eat healthier foods
That means very little. What does that mean? Eating Raisin Bran? Eating lots of leaves? Cutting out red meat? Eating lots of fruit?
> move around in general
Moving around can certainly help, but for weight loss and maintenance, it's far more efficient to eat an appropriate fuel substrate and to not eat excessively. You could burn 235 calories climbing the Empire State building for 30 minutes, or you could simply not eat those 235 calories and do something more interesting or productive with that time.
This isn't to say that there aren't possible cardiovascular benefits from exercise, but it's not as efficient for fat burning as people think. For most of that 30 minutes the human body will be burning primarily glucose, so unless one is fasted they won't be shredding fat from the second they start climbing those stairs.
> the truth is that it ultimately comes down to choosing foods that are good for you
Again, any individual is unlikely to actually know what that means or come to a consensus with the next person on what that means. "eat healthy" means nothing.
> rather than taking diet pills
Yeah, they probably shouldn't do that.
> or doing some extreme diet like keto or carnivore
Neither of those are particularly "extreme" except that they eliminate many of the things that cause the human body to keep holding on to fat. As it turns out, they're both low-insulin diets, and the latter diet is the one that is most species-appropriate out of just about any other diet.
No one has to eat keto or carnivore, but to suggest people shouldn't eat either form of diet is based on... what, exactly?
> And that can be _hard_, because eating good food and being lazy are very easy to do and can be quite enjoyable.
I agree. Eating good food is easy and enjoyable once one breaks past the standard advice of "eat healthy."
Plenty of people (although unfortunately not me) just don’t eat “junk food”. They aren’t trying to diet, it’s just their habit. I don’t know anyone who just happens to be keto cause that’s what they gravitate towards eating.
There's no such thing as not being on a diet. Everyone is on a diet all the time. Some diets are shittier than others.
Where are you and others here on HN getting this idea that a diet necessarily means something temporary?
Most diets that aren't hypocaloric are meant to be a lifestyle. An actually healthful diet can promote health and weight loss without restricting calories or being a temporary measure, and such diets are usually more successful in the long run than telling people to eat leaves and wiggle a lot. When a diet is sufficient for daily needs, there's no need for it to be temporary, then it shouldn't be a diet but the diet for a given person.
> junk food
As an aside, most people have no idea what that even is. Raisin Bran is arguably junk food, but most people wouldn't think to classify it as such. Some people think eggs are junk food.
Seems more like an adjustment of your idea of what constitutes "food", so we're talking "definitions" rather than a "diet".
It seems merely sane to consider as "Not-Food" slurries or cakes of highly processed or synthetic carbon-based chemicals that are only distantly sourced from plants or animals, and to consider as "Is-Food" items that are very directly harvested from plants or animals.
Look at bread: one must work quite hard to find ANY "bread" product that does not contain sugar in significant quantities. That is not bread, it is cake. Sugar in significant amounts has toxic effects on the body.
Look at mayonnaise: most of it has significant quantities of Omega-6 oils. This is because the actual recipes for mayonnaise contain omega-3s, but Omega-3s have short shelf life. Omega-6s also have substantially toxic effects over the long term, yet almost everything on the grocery shelves is made with them.
There are scores more examples in basic staples.
The food supply has been massively corrupted primarily for the benefit of the manufacturers, to increase sales and convenience. That does not mean that it is still actual food.
Literally, merely changing my basic cheese sandwiches to actual (non-sugar) bread and eliminating store mayo (usually using just olive oil or occasionally mixing mayo fresh) has had a substantially positive effect on my health. It also tastes FAR better.
So, I don't consider it to be a diet to merely select actual food instead of the industrial products sold as food — I still eat nominally the same sandwich recipe every lunch as before, just with real ingredients, and I get better enjoyment and results.
In the US at least, the word "diet" always implies some kind of calorie reduction and specific food choices. Things like "paleo diet" or "low-carb diet" define specific things to eat and not eat. The term "dieting" is associated with being in a caloric deficit, ostensibly to lose weight.
Avoiding ultra-processed and fried foods is not "dieting" in that sense, any more than choosing to eat one thing over another.
> In the US at least, the word "diet" always implies some kind of calorie reduction and specific food choices.
In other words... exactly what the article recommends. Cutting out processed and fried foods eliminates a lot of the standard diet the average American eats. It might sound moderate to just suggest those two things, but it's really not.
Reducing or eliminating processed foods means little to no pancakes, breakfast cereals of any kind, toast, frozen meals, pop tarts, chips, granola bars, sodas, shelf-stable juices, Starbucks lattes, mac 'n cheese, cured meats, energy bars, and on and on and on.
Likewise, for fried foods that would mean little to no french fries, curly fries, onion rings, potato chips, fried chicken, fish and chips, corn dogs, doughnuts, churros, etc.
Maybe to those on HN would find it easy to cut out those foods, but a large amount of Americans eat a substantial amount of those things every day due to their availability, affordability, and addictive qualities.
What we end up with when aiming "to cut out junk like processed and fried foods" really isn't that far off from low carb diets, paleo, vegan, "Mediterranean", keto, or even carnivore. They all restrict or eliminate the things the author of the article suggests cutting out in such few words.
> The term "dieting" is associated with being in a caloric deficit, ostensibly to lose weight.
Do you mean to tell me that vegans aren't eating a diet unless they're trying to lose weight? What about those eating low carb for possible longevity reasons rather than calorie restriction or weight loss?
Honestly, as someone who has lived in the US their entire lives, I've never heard of this strange parallel definition of what it means to be on a diet. People can be on diets for any number of reasons, whether it's for longevity, inflammation, athletic performance, or weight loss. It's contextual. If a person's intent is to be on some kind of specific diet (and as I went over already, a no-processed-no-fried diet is actually quite specific), then they are on a diet.
> The problem is that so much of what’s sold in the name of modern-day wellness has little to no evidence of working. Which doesn’t mean that wellness isn’t a real thing.
I guess that this is true for any advice. You find good ones, and you find others from not useful to harmful.
> Another big issue with what passes for modern-day wellness is that it creates the impression that everyone is happy all the time and that you should be, too.
I found to be there other way around, it could depend on country, thou. Well being is more acceptant that being sad is part of being human. And I found this acceptance not only from professionals but even from on line comics and memes.
> Better than a fit mindset is a development mindset, in which you understand that passion takes time to emerge, thus lowering the bar for further engagement in something from “this is perfect” to “this is interesting.
Good advice, I do not find it novel. Maybe I am surrounded by above average good advice and the world is still catching up to more sensible approaches.
Another post treating psychology and nutrition science as a science. For most of the claims presented in the article, I could find a study which "proves" opposite.
The advice given is sound and I try to practice it myself. As opposed to adhering to strict, specialised routines I just move and work out when I can in various ways, I avoid sugar and try to eat more greens. It works really well for me.
But the article doesn’t do a good job of debunking the “trendy” wellness. Yeah, if it has the word detox in it it’s probably bullshit, but that’s about all they have to say. There absolutely are modern practices that are effective and worthwhile. Mindfulness is a big one. Massages, yoga etc are also genuinely effective.
>>>> According to decades of research, wellness is a lifestyle or state of being that goes beyond merely the absence of disease and into the realm of maximizing human potential. Once someone’s basic needs are met (e.g., food and shelter), scientists say that wellness emerges from nourishing six dimensions of your health: physical, emotional, cognitive, social, spiritual, and environmental. According to research published in 1997 in The American Journal of Health Promotion, these dimensions are closely intertwined. Evidence suggests that they work together to create a sum that is greater than its parts.
> you don't think there's any science showing that these factors are relevant to physical and mental health?
I’d be curious to see it. Why those factors but not others? Why is spirituality segregated from cognitive or mental health, broadly? How are these terms experimentally defined?
There is thorough scientific evidence showing that:
1) Mindset (positive or negative) has direct effects on physiology
2) Strong social bonds and a sense of community is beneficial to health, while the inverse is detrimental
3) Meditation and mindfulness can positively affect physiology
4) Chronic stress is detrimental to health (and having an existential terror of death is surely a source of conscious or unconscious chronic stress for many)
These are all things which religion and spirituality can help with.
Religion, a social determinant of mortality? A 10-year follow-up of the Health and Retirement Study
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
There's plenty of good advice in there, but did anyone else get the feeling that this post was just going through the standard Wellness checklist anyway? They're criticizing "Peak Wellness", but then go through the same exact bullet points I see everywhere...what happens when you do everything "right", but still feel empty?
> I can’t tell you how many people I know who feel “trapped” in big cities like New York or San Francisco. Move! There are plenty of places with lower costs of living, more access to nature, and good jobs.
I felt trapped in the suburbs, personally. Moving to NYC is what made me feel free.
Freedom is the ability to change your circumstances.
If you feel like you can't then it doesn't matter how objectively well off you are, you will be miserable. The drug addictions and mental illness of the kids of the rich and famous I went to school with told me that there's more to life than money, the drug addictions and mental illness of the counter culture I spend my 20s with told me there's very little money doesn't improve.
Moving to a place where you can easily walk to most places you need to be on a regular basis is great for your mental health and overall wellness. Heck, just walking everywhere is good for your overall wellness!
I'm just informally applying the Pareto Principle and assuming the overwhelming majority of the folks here on HN live in urban or suburban environments and this scenario wouldn't apply.
walking for needed stuff is more motivation than just plain walking?
Yes. That's why some doctors recommend their patients to get a dog. The dog provides the motivation to take a daily walk. Most people won't walk for the fun of it if the weather conditions aren't ideal.
The dog provides the motivation to take a daily walk.
Don't get a dog for this reason, because once you've convinced yourself that the dog doesn't need a walk every day, then you and a dog get fat sitting on the couch watching Netflix. As a lifelong distance runner, I am well aware that the hardest step is the one out the front door, but don't for an instance think that a dog is going to fix that long-term.
I live on a 100+ acre rural property just outside a large city. Surrounded by mansions and massive estates, and with a world renowned walking trail literally just down the street.
There are many things I like. There are many things I don't. Not least that everything is a 20+ minute drive away. Everything feels entirely remote.
Now add endless ticks (for some reason worse than ever the past two years), black flies, mosquitoes, wasp nests appearing everywhere, the stink of farm fields, closer still the stink of septic beds (whenever a low pressure system rolls in you smell the septic tanks. And to be clear, this is an area of very high end homes all on massive lots). Every storm is a power outage, requiring eventually equipping a whole house generator. Every snow storm is a disaster. Grounds maintenance is an endless pit of effort. The streets are barely wide enough for cars so a walk feels like a death defying activity, and almost no one actually does it. The trail is always incredibly busy.
Before we lived here we lived in a small home across from a grocery store shopping complex in an urban area. The backyard was tiny and we had nosey neighbours who'd hang over the fence and watch what you were doing. You'd hear the endless rattle of crapbox Civics with noise-making mufflers, blasting the bassline of some rap.
I enjoyed living in that tiny house way, way more. I loved just walking across the street early Sunday morning, while everyone slept, and smelling all the freshly baked goods, getting a croissant fresh from the oven. A five minute walk yielded parks, trails, pizza places, sushi, and everything else.
I have no idea why I posted this, but happiness in life really isn't as easily assessed as we often think. There are many who would be absolutely certain that their life would be nothing but bliss if they lived where I did. Humans don't work like that.
Different strokes for different folks. At different times in their lives.
Don’t expect something as subjective as happiness to also be rational.
In my teen years, I felt trapped where I grew up so I moved to NYC.
In my early 20s, I couldn’t afford Manhattan so I moved to the suburbs.
In my mid 20s, I felt trapped in the suburbs so I moved [back] to NYC.
In my early 30s, I felt trapped in NYC and just recently moved back to the suburbs.
In 15-20 years, I’ll probably think along the lines of folks who say they want a pied-a-terre in NYC for the (non-winter) weekends and suburbs during the week.
Thanks for the vocabulary. I've been thinking about this option myself, combined with an edge-of-town main residence, with the full home office + gym + etc.
The convenience of being able to just go to a population center and have all of your creature comforts handled is the big draw for me.
A bigger question might be "Why is the demand for "wellness" so great?"
Generations and generations before us have not had the issues we have currently. You can blame diet, environment, activity level, whichever, but clearly there has been a wellness degradation in the last few decades.
Probably because back then people hadn't figured out yet that you could make a lot of money with it. There was no supply and no demand. Wellness had to come into being first. Then grow up and become an industry.
> The deal that DSHEA and NCCAM made with the public was this: Let the supplement industry have free reign [sic] to market untested products with unsupported claims, and then we’ll fund reliable studies to arm the public with scientific information so they can make good decisions for themselves. This "experiment" (really just a gift to the supplement industry) has been a dismal failure. The result has been an explosion of the supplement industry flooding the marketplace with useless products and false claims.[16]
Oh hey, another public policy decision driven by the "informed individual choice" dogma and ignoring systemic factors.
FYI I'm old enough to have been able to actually see the explosion of supplements and the rise of the supplement industry. It's crazy how much shelf space even in a standard grocery store is taken up by everything from acai berry to zinc lozenges, of which maybe 10% have even promising evidence for being beneficial[1]. Note that Zinc is among the 10%, showing good evidence for reducing the length and severity of colds.
However, there are people making a lot of money, and the advice given in this article can't be sold in bottle.
Things like cancer, Alzheimer's and so on that are higher in modern times are primarily diseases of the elderly. They were less common prior to recent generations because of the smaller number of people who managed to get to the age where those would be problems. Yes, you can argue that (in some countries but not at all globally) there has been a small decrease in life expectancy over the last couple of decades but that is insignificant compared to the advances made over the last century.
Not as long as the science and statistics is junk. Some people actually still believe that meat causes cancer based on a study that didn't even control for highly processed meats, equating a slice of baloney with a grassfed filet
> Dr. Hu says that an accumulated body of evidence shows a clear link between high intake of red and processed meats and a higher risk for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and premature death. "The evidence is consistent across different studies,"
and is the keyword. These studies are not controlling for only high quality red meat in the diet. Eating anything processed is going to confound the data in the study, as opposed to something like a hunter-gatherer diet in which most of the calories come from hunted red meat. Those cultures don't get cancer
"Some kinds of red meat are not necessarily healthier. There are no firm studies that have shown nutritional or health advantages from eating organic or grass-fed beef.
"These types of red meat are often more desirable as they contain low or no growth hormones compared with grain-fed beef, but it's still not clear if they offer any health benefits," says Dr. Hu."
> Those cultures don't get cancer
Citation needed. Show me that they don't get cancer and show me that they don't get cancer because of the specific meat that they eat.
63 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 89.7 ms ] threadIn other words... go on a diet?
Actually it's even more simple. You don't need to eat healthier or move around more. You simply need to consume approx 100-150 calories less than you burn per day (BMR + additional activities).
If you do this, you will lose weight whether you get all those calories from only burgers or from lean chicken salad.
The first problem with that simple math is that calorie counts on packaging can be off by a substantial amount. In the United States, the FDA allows calorie counts on packaging to be as inaccurate as 20%.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3605747/
This doesn't mean all foods are going to deviate by 20% but that potential is there, and even around a 7% over or underestimation can still be a big deal if you're really going to be bean-counting calories to such an extent.
Good luck accurately determining your individual BMR with a simple calculator (Harris-Benedict formula) or your TDEE. Those formulae can be off by hundreds of calories, and are likely to be even less accurate the more obese a person is.
> If you do this, you will lose weight whether you get all those calories from only burgers or from lean chicken salad.
If, hypothetically, someone drinks milkshakes day in and day out, a 150 calorie TDEE deficit is going to be meaningless.
Energy substrates aren't equivalent. Every macro, and even different molecules have their own metabolic pathways and the body utilizes them in very different ways.
It's not only untenable, it's infeasible. The only way to "directly" calculate one's energy expenditure is to either place them inside a direct calorimeter or to use respiratory gas analysis, and to adhere to very strict protocols. And no, fitness bands and watches are not accurate enough to overcome the margin of error.
Sure, one can keep lowering the amount of food they eat until they get some kind of result from it. In that case, there's almost no point in trying any sort of BMR calculation flim-flam whatsoever. They'd be better off just eyeballing how much they eat and reducing the volume and the frequency.
Regardless, my point stands. Suggesting that the answer is to "simply" intake ~150 fewer calories of energy per day is to suggest that the vast majority of people are equipped with the skills and knowledge to even get close to that kind of accuracy in any sort of calculation. Maybe one can get lucky and see results from such a "simple" calculation because of their individual biology and eating habits, but the margin of error is still very high.
Let's set aside reality for a moment and pretend that calorie counts on packaging were perfectly accurate and that the Harris-Benedict equation works perfectly for everyone. That still wouldn't matter the inference of calories of food are/were measured as heat in a bomb calorimeter (i.e. setting food on fire and recording how much heat is emitted). The calorie count that appears on a food package is a guess based on the composition of macronutrients. With the exception of fiber, the calories of fat, protein, and carbs are combined together to form the single count based on how they typically burn in a calorimeter. This introduces more inaccuracy depending on the type of fiber since it may be fermented into digestible substrate.
The human body is nothing like a bomb calorimeter. It treats different forms of energy differently, and different forms of energy are utilized to varying amounts, and are even utilized differently in the presence of one another. If you take a dump, let it dry and then light it on fire, it will burn because there's excess energy being passed through and not converted to heat by the body. Food may pass faster or slower depending on what it's composed of. Fiber can not only do that but also prevent the digestion of nutrients. A diet that mixes lots of fat and carbs together facilitates the storage of more energy as fat than if either of them were eaten in isolation. Protein has more of a thermic effect (the body emitting more heat) than either carbs or fat.
Point being, if one really does not want to lose weight by actually choosing to eat foods that are appropriate for their digestive system, or to eat food that is low in energy density (ex. leafy greens), then they might as well cut down on food to such an extent that they would be able to notice it without punching numbers into a calculator. A substantial amount would have to be reduced from the diet to have a reasonable amount of confidence that one is indeed eating less energy than the body is expending in a day.
Staying active both burns calories directly, and iirc keeps your metabolism a bit above idle.
Both of these things make it easier to actually get that calorie deficit.
Coming from a standard westernized diet high in processed foods, you'll probably lose some weight just by changing makeup of diet, but if you're overweight you won't lose all of the excess without sustained caloric restriction.
The comments like this are just noise from the folks that probably never had an issue with those stuff.
One can lose weight by eating nothing but plant leaves. Is that "good" food or a "good" diet? Such a diet would be unsustainable in the long run simply because said food is neither dense enough in energy nor dense enough in nutrients. That doesn't sound particularly good to me. But many people equate salad to being "healthy", such that they will add lettuce to the things they actually want to eat because of a mystical believe that plant material is inherently good.
People like to reduce it to 2 binary things as usual, but there is nothing simple or easy or cheap about maintaining your health. Its extremely hard.
You need to measure things yourself all the time, know a lot of theory, and experiment a lot, because due to bio-individuality you can extrapolate from other people findings in a limited manner.
I'll give the article credit for mentioning processed foods, but otherwise, many people and even experts disagree on what makes a food healthy. Telling people to just not "eat crap" and to cut out processed and fried foods is barely specific enough to be useful.
The utility of eating a specific diet is that it actually identifies what foods should be avoided and why. If uneducated individuals just "eat healthy", they are likely to do things that either won't work or will backfire in the long run.
> A lot of people think a diet is this magical thing that makes it easy for you
Yes, because that's what an appropriate diet tends to do. When you eat a diet that doesn't overly engage the Randle cycle or raise insulin, losing body fat usually follows whether one counts their calories or not. If someone is overweight and they eat a low insulinogenic diet, and their food is satiating, both their eating frequency and their biology is likely to shift to not hold on to so much body fat anymore. The only thing that's not easy about such a diet is not being tempted by all the common foods that interfere with the metabolism.
> you really just have to eat healthier foods
That means very little. What does that mean? Eating Raisin Bran? Eating lots of leaves? Cutting out red meat? Eating lots of fruit?
> move around in general
Moving around can certainly help, but for weight loss and maintenance, it's far more efficient to eat an appropriate fuel substrate and to not eat excessively. You could burn 235 calories climbing the Empire State building for 30 minutes, or you could simply not eat those 235 calories and do something more interesting or productive with that time.
This isn't to say that there aren't possible cardiovascular benefits from exercise, but it's not as efficient for fat burning as people think. For most of that 30 minutes the human body will be burning primarily glucose, so unless one is fasted they won't be shredding fat from the second they start climbing those stairs.
> the truth is that it ultimately comes down to choosing foods that are good for you
Again, any individual is unlikely to actually know what that means or come to a consensus with the next person on what that means. "eat healthy" means nothing.
> rather than taking diet pills
Yeah, they probably shouldn't do that.
> or doing some extreme diet like keto or carnivore
Neither of those are particularly "extreme" except that they eliminate many of the things that cause the human body to keep holding on to fat. As it turns out, they're both low-insulin diets, and the latter diet is the one that is most species-appropriate out of just about any other diet.
No one has to eat keto or carnivore, but to suggest people shouldn't eat either form of diet is based on... what, exactly?
> And that can be _hard_, because eating good food and being lazy are very easy to do and can be quite enjoyable.
I agree. Eating good food is easy and enjoyable once one breaks past the standard advice of "eat healthy."
I'd argue it's not a diet, it's "avoid damaging your body with toxins" and very valid and useful life choice.
Where are you and others here on HN getting this idea that a diet necessarily means something temporary?
Most diets that aren't hypocaloric are meant to be a lifestyle. An actually healthful diet can promote health and weight loss without restricting calories or being a temporary measure, and such diets are usually more successful in the long run than telling people to eat leaves and wiggle a lot. When a diet is sufficient for daily needs, there's no need for it to be temporary, then it shouldn't be a diet but the diet for a given person.
> junk food
As an aside, most people have no idea what that even is. Raisin Bran is arguably junk food, but most people wouldn't think to classify it as such. Some people think eggs are junk food.
It seems merely sane to consider as "Not-Food" slurries or cakes of highly processed or synthetic carbon-based chemicals that are only distantly sourced from plants or animals, and to consider as "Is-Food" items that are very directly harvested from plants or animals.
Look at bread: one must work quite hard to find ANY "bread" product that does not contain sugar in significant quantities. That is not bread, it is cake. Sugar in significant amounts has toxic effects on the body.
Look at mayonnaise: most of it has significant quantities of Omega-6 oils. This is because the actual recipes for mayonnaise contain omega-3s, but Omega-3s have short shelf life. Omega-6s also have substantially toxic effects over the long term, yet almost everything on the grocery shelves is made with them.
There are scores more examples in basic staples.
The food supply has been massively corrupted primarily for the benefit of the manufacturers, to increase sales and convenience. That does not mean that it is still actual food.
Literally, merely changing my basic cheese sandwiches to actual (non-sugar) bread and eliminating store mayo (usually using just olive oil or occasionally mixing mayo fresh) has had a substantially positive effect on my health. It also tastes FAR better.
So, I don't consider it to be a diet to merely select actual food instead of the industrial products sold as food — I still eat nominally the same sandwich recipe every lunch as before, just with real ingredients, and I get better enjoyment and results.
In the US at least, the word "diet" always implies some kind of calorie reduction and specific food choices. Things like "paleo diet" or "low-carb diet" define specific things to eat and not eat. The term "dieting" is associated with being in a caloric deficit, ostensibly to lose weight.
Avoiding ultra-processed and fried foods is not "dieting" in that sense, any more than choosing to eat one thing over another.
In other words... exactly what the article recommends. Cutting out processed and fried foods eliminates a lot of the standard diet the average American eats. It might sound moderate to just suggest those two things, but it's really not.
Reducing or eliminating processed foods means little to no pancakes, breakfast cereals of any kind, toast, frozen meals, pop tarts, chips, granola bars, sodas, shelf-stable juices, Starbucks lattes, mac 'n cheese, cured meats, energy bars, and on and on and on.
Likewise, for fried foods that would mean little to no french fries, curly fries, onion rings, potato chips, fried chicken, fish and chips, corn dogs, doughnuts, churros, etc.
Maybe to those on HN would find it easy to cut out those foods, but a large amount of Americans eat a substantial amount of those things every day due to their availability, affordability, and addictive qualities.
What we end up with when aiming "to cut out junk like processed and fried foods" really isn't that far off from low carb diets, paleo, vegan, "Mediterranean", keto, or even carnivore. They all restrict or eliminate the things the author of the article suggests cutting out in such few words.
> The term "dieting" is associated with being in a caloric deficit, ostensibly to lose weight.
Do you mean to tell me that vegans aren't eating a diet unless they're trying to lose weight? What about those eating low carb for possible longevity reasons rather than calorie restriction or weight loss?
Honestly, as someone who has lived in the US their entire lives, I've never heard of this strange parallel definition of what it means to be on a diet. People can be on diets for any number of reasons, whether it's for longevity, inflammation, athletic performance, or weight loss. It's contextual. If a person's intent is to be on some kind of specific diet (and as I went over already, a no-processed-no-fried diet is actually quite specific), then they are on a diet.
I guess that this is true for any advice. You find good ones, and you find others from not useful to harmful.
> Another big issue with what passes for modern-day wellness is that it creates the impression that everyone is happy all the time and that you should be, too.
I found to be there other way around, it could depend on country, thou. Well being is more acceptant that being sad is part of being human. And I found this acceptance not only from professionals but even from on line comics and memes.
> Better than a fit mindset is a development mindset, in which you understand that passion takes time to emerge, thus lowering the bar for further engagement in something from “this is perfect” to “this is interesting.
Good advice, I do not find it novel. Maybe I am surrounded by above average good advice and the world is still catching up to more sensible approaches.
But the article doesn’t do a good job of debunking the “trendy” wellness. Yeah, if it has the word detox in it it’s probably bullshit, but that’s about all they have to say. There absolutely are modern practices that are effective and worthwhile. Mindfulness is a big one. Massages, yoga etc are also genuinely effective.
This is pure woo. What scientists?
>physical, emotional, cognitive, social, spiritual, and environmental
Are you saying you don't think there's any science showing that these factors are relevant to physical and mental health?
I’d be curious to see it. Why those factors but not others? Why is spirituality segregated from cognitive or mental health, broadly? How are these terms experimentally defined?
There is thorough scientific evidence showing that:
1) Mindset (positive or negative) has direct effects on physiology
2) Strong social bonds and a sense of community is beneficial to health, while the inverse is detrimental
3) Meditation and mindfulness can positively affect physiology
4) Chronic stress is detrimental to health (and having an existential terror of death is surely a source of conscious or unconscious chronic stress for many)
These are all things which religion and spirituality can help with.
Religion, a social determinant of mortality? A 10-year follow-up of the Health and Retirement Study
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Reward, salience, and attentional networks are activated by religious experience in devout Mormons
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/17470919.2016.125743...
Neurobiology of Spirituality
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3190564/
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I can’t tell you how many people I know who feel “trapped” in big cities like New York or San Francisco. Move! There are plenty of places with lower costs of living, more access to nature, and good jobs.
I felt trapped in the suburbs, personally. Moving to NYC is what made me feel free.
If you feel like you can't then it doesn't matter how objectively well off you are, you will be miserable. The drug addictions and mental illness of the kids of the rich and famous I went to school with told me that there's more to life than money, the drug addictions and mental illness of the counter culture I spend my 20s with told me there's very little money doesn't improve.
What if it is a 5 acre rural property with nearby trails and such?
I guess your logic is, walking for needed stuff is more motivation than just plain walking?
I suppose, for some. Others I know just uber and uber eats everything, and amazon for groceries, and so on...
At least where I live, I have to walk around inside the grocery store myself...
walking for needed stuff is more motivation than just plain walking?
Yes. That's why some doctors recommend their patients to get a dog. The dog provides the motivation to take a daily walk. Most people won't walk for the fun of it if the weather conditions aren't ideal.
Don't get a dog for this reason, because once you've convinced yourself that the dog doesn't need a walk every day, then you and a dog get fat sitting on the couch watching Netflix. As a lifelong distance runner, I am well aware that the hardest step is the one out the front door, but don't for an instance think that a dog is going to fix that long-term.
There are many things I like. There are many things I don't. Not least that everything is a 20+ minute drive away. Everything feels entirely remote.
Now add endless ticks (for some reason worse than ever the past two years), black flies, mosquitoes, wasp nests appearing everywhere, the stink of farm fields, closer still the stink of septic beds (whenever a low pressure system rolls in you smell the septic tanks. And to be clear, this is an area of very high end homes all on massive lots). Every storm is a power outage, requiring eventually equipping a whole house generator. Every snow storm is a disaster. Grounds maintenance is an endless pit of effort. The streets are barely wide enough for cars so a walk feels like a death defying activity, and almost no one actually does it. The trail is always incredibly busy.
Before we lived here we lived in a small home across from a grocery store shopping complex in an urban area. The backyard was tiny and we had nosey neighbours who'd hang over the fence and watch what you were doing. You'd hear the endless rattle of crapbox Civics with noise-making mufflers, blasting the bassline of some rap.
I enjoyed living in that tiny house way, way more. I loved just walking across the street early Sunday morning, while everyone slept, and smelling all the freshly baked goods, getting a croissant fresh from the oven. A five minute walk yielded parks, trails, pizza places, sushi, and everything else.
I have no idea why I posted this, but happiness in life really isn't as easily assessed as we often think. There are many who would be absolutely certain that their life would be nothing but bliss if they lived where I did. Humans don't work like that.
Ironically many people would answer to feel free when moving out of a big city.
At least I do.
Don’t expect something as subjective as happiness to also be rational.
In my teen years, I felt trapped where I grew up so I moved to NYC.
In my early 20s, I couldn’t afford Manhattan so I moved to the suburbs.
In my mid 20s, I felt trapped in the suburbs so I moved [back] to NYC.
In my early 30s, I felt trapped in NYC and just recently moved back to the suburbs.
In 15-20 years, I’ll probably think along the lines of folks who say they want a pied-a-terre in NYC for the (non-winter) weekends and suburbs during the week.
Thanks for the vocabulary. I've been thinking about this option myself, combined with an edge-of-town main residence, with the full home office + gym + etc.
The convenience of being able to just go to a population center and have all of your creature comforts handled is the big draw for me.
Generations and generations before us have not had the issues we have currently. You can blame diet, environment, activity level, whichever, but clearly there has been a wellness degradation in the last few decades.
Wellness as a business is around forever...
> The deal that DSHEA and NCCAM made with the public was this: Let the supplement industry have free reign [sic] to market untested products with unsupported claims, and then we’ll fund reliable studies to arm the public with scientific information so they can make good decisions for themselves. This "experiment" (really just a gift to the supplement industry) has been a dismal failure. The result has been an explosion of the supplement industry flooding the marketplace with useless products and false claims.[16]
FYI I'm old enough to have been able to actually see the explosion of supplements and the rise of the supplement industry. It's crazy how much shelf space even in a standard grocery store is taken up by everything from acai berry to zinc lozenges, of which maybe 10% have even promising evidence for being beneficial[1]. Note that Zinc is among the 10%, showing good evidence for reducing the length and severity of colds.
However, there are people making a lot of money, and the advice given in this article can't be sold in bottle.
1 https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-...
> Red and processed meats do increase health risks.
> Dr. Hu says that an accumulated body of evidence shows a clear link between high intake of red and processed meats and a higher risk for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and premature death. "The evidence is consistent across different studies,"
"These types of red meat are often more desirable as they contain low or no growth hormones compared with grain-fed beef, but it's still not clear if they offer any health benefits," says Dr. Hu."
> Those cultures don't get cancer
Citation needed. Show me that they don't get cancer and show me that they don't get cancer because of the specific meat that they eat.