Another variation of this: Advice is what the person giving it needs to hear for themself.
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.
The mode is completely different. You have to twist Cuban’s words to make him say the same thing as Jobs. Because he didn’t say “find the thing you love” he said spend enough effort on what you’re doing until it becomes the thing you love. Jobs is about an actual search, which takes effort, for sure. Cuban is about transformation in place.
Not at all. Jobs is not implying that you should, like, jump from minimum wage job to minimum wage job until you find one you like. He is suggesting that if you put in effort, like learning deeply about something, that will close the gaps that are necessarily closed to find true love. Which is the same thing Cuban is saying.
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.
> Which is why I find it pretty funny that Ozempic is arguably the biggest weight-loss breakthrough in decades - and all it does is make you…eat less. Billions in R&D, and the answer was the platitude the whole time. Ha.
The problem was not that we didn’t know what to do ("eat less"), but to enable that solution.
I'm far from being an expert on this specific subject but, I have the impression that Ozempic does a lot of things in one's body in order to reduce the appetite and result in eating less. Which is to say that, the author sounds like he's implying that the solution to this was trivial all along, by deliberately omitting the underlying mechanism that makes it work.
The interesting solution to smoking was social pressure. No smoking in restaurants, no smoking on planes, general intolerance to smokers, insane taxes on tobacco... suddenly, smokers for 30 years started quitting at a certain breaking point.
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.
The nice thing about ozempic is that it makes people less hungry and less able to eat large portions. Once 30% of the country is on it, expect buffets to go out of business and restaurants to need to shift to smaller portions in response. So it'll make it easier for everyone not on the drugs too.
> Once 30% of the country is on it, expect buffets to go out of business and restaurants to need to shift to smaller portions in response
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.
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.
This ignores how food today isn't much like food of the past. It has all manner of added sugars and things to make it more marketable, hence higher profits, but also causes over-eating. Snack culture is pretty much an attempt to make food as addictive as possible, and many of those methods are in 'regular' food too.
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.
To be fair, we also knew how to enable it long before Ozempic arrived. We had hundreds of thousands of years of successfully "eating less" to look back upon for answers.
But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.
Basically every diet program for the last 4 years, every change to food or social habits at least in the US, failed to curb it. So in a pretty real sense we did not know how to eat less successfully, emphasis on successfully.
Are you saying that Ozempic allows you to escape society or that all the fat people are actually just druggies? Like, either way it's wild, but I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable take.
Plenty of options exist that enable the solutions around weight loss. The issue is that 99% of those are difficult to either start and/or maintain consistency with. Ozempic just happened to address both of those issues in one swoop because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives.
I'm sure your comment is made in good faith and I agree with it (in meaning), but this:
> 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 phrasing could have been chosen better but the meaning still stands. Amongst all of the valid and accessible options for weight loss, society will without a doubt choose the weight loss pill/shot bar none. All for the simple reason of minimizing friction above all else.
That's true, but the fact that it wasn't easy created a huge industry of fake information regarding alternative explanations of weight loss from CICO. It's nice to have some more obvious evidence to convince people that no, your body can't magically move and exercise for free when you eat less, among other strange claims I've heard from people struggling to lose weight. People stuck in that rut of not being able to eat less were prone to being deceived by countless weight loss products when the real solution (also hard mind you, but at least more viable) would have been to focus on which activities and diets actually allowed them personally to maintain a calorie deficit.
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.
I would push back and say that a lot of people didn't actually know that. They came up with elaborate reasons why eating less doesn't work, but keto works, or paleo works, or eliminating sugar works, or vegan works, or it's just physically impossible to lose weight.
They did that because the other thing didn't work. It doesn't matter that the reason it didn't work is that they can't do it: the implication is identical.
Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.
I am constantly arguing with all of my friends and family who believe primary way to loose weight is to exercise more.
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.
The problem, as it is for a shitload of women, is that the delta between "Minimum amount of calories needed to not be somewhat malnourished" and "calories you eat now without losing weight" is sometimes zero. Short women working desk jobs are fucked
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.
Getting down to 1200 or 1400 calories is pretty restrictive yeah. You can't do it without counting and meal prep the same way you can go from 3000 to 2000 by skipping snacks
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.
Correct - feeling hungry is part of it. It's the biggest (And only notable one IMO) downside. It's temporary, while the loss is happening. Stops once you stabilize.
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
I mean, these things are multimodal. For most people it's easier to cut enough calories to lose weight than it is to exercise enough to lose weight (though both are physically possible). But, of course, if you are losing weight you should be exercising! It's the best way to retain muscle mass, which is vital for health.
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 generally agree with you, but I do want to point out that while we often talk about losing weight, what we really want to lose is fat, and exercise absolutely can help with that. Past a certain point I've personally found it very hard to sustainably eat less, but easy to put on significant muscle at the same calorie budget, so while my weight has been stable for years, my body fat % has significantly decreased.
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.
Another thing to note that what's required to lose weight is a calorie deficit, not just eating less. This is important, because the body will compensate for a reduced calorie intake by reducing energy expenditure in various subtle ways. Experientially this can feel like having no energy.
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.
I would push back against your pushback and say nearly everyone knows that, it's just the brain is great at making excuses when things are physically difficult.
I agree sort of, but the argument here is do the simple thing, like "eat less". There; we're done - ha! My initial reaction (and also with the chose boring tech) is that's not the solution, that's where you start LOOKING for the solution! So boring is great, simple is fantastic - from a position of understanding. Too many people jump onto any "new thing" - diet, technology, whatever - because it's easy and right in front of them. Simple is often neither.
I'd say that "eat less" and "make a lot of money" are both helpful, winning strategies but lack the tactical details necessary to bring them into effect. Agreed that it's not helpful to toss them out at someone as if implementation is easy.
I will counter-pushback. I don't think I have encountered a single person in the past 15+ years who denied or was unaware of the basic thermodynamics of "calories in, calories out". What I do see time and time again is people with manageable appetites pushing "just eat less" with keyword "just", acting as though people's failure to do so secretly reveals a preference to be overweight.
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!)
I will poke at the last sentence a bit, as it's important to understanding the phrnomena you described. There was and is a lot of FUD about this. Many people knew it's true, including from first hand experience.
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.
>People had/have a hard time accepting "eat less to not be fat".
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.
The whole irony is that quote is making the exact mistake his post is about: "eat less" is great advice for people where eating less isn't that hard, but it's not helpful advice for people who struggle mightily with eating less and who live in an environment of calorie rich, nutrient poor foods. I've naturally always been skinny, I often find eating a chore. Eating less is incredibly easy for me, but eating right and exercising enough to maintain muscle is the hard part for me.
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.
“Eating less” is the bottom line, but the road there can be fraught.
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.
After reading this sentence, I don't trust the author. Misleading as hell.
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.
But the people claiming that they were some special case that just "couldn't lose weight" no matter how little they ate were bullshitting you. They couldn't handle the suffering, and as such the calorie intake was larger than the calories burned. They wanted you to believe eating less wasn't the solution. The drug proves that it WAS the solution, suffering aside.
Different people experience different levels of suffering.
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...
>The success of GLP-1 is based on the fact that the patient can eat less without suffering.
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
It is literally crazy how many people, particularly women, have told me that they are some sort of special case, where eating less food will not make them lose weight. Earnestly told me to my face that “calories in, calories out” is simply not true for everybody. “Where do you think the matter that makes up your body comes from?” I ask incredulously, already knowing that this is just going to get me into trouble.
Obviously there are dozens of 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.
This one has a super simple answer. They eat too many carbs.
When carbs spike their blood sugar, insulin swoops in to immediately convert the glucose into fat. When they try to restrict calories, they focus on cutting the wrong macros. Carbs are easy to miscount/underestimate those calories unless you're literally weighing the food.
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.
I think that calories in calories out is a reasonable heuristic, but biology is more complicated than physics.
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.
Reducing the (frankly near-miraculous) host of effects that GLP-1 medications induce in the human body to "make you eat less" is grounds for instant mistrust. There is so, so, so much more that goes into them than just reducing appetite (whether it's helping your brain modulate dopamine signals, smoothing out glycemic control, reducing inflammation more generally, the list goes on). I think the pharmaceutical industry is as guilty of time and money wasting as anyone, but billions in R&D did actually yield quite a coup this time!
We should distinguish between 1:many advice and 1:1 advice.
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.
"good objective feedback" - right, I think advice in general is bad because it tries to bite size a complex system, that is society/humanity. Feedback is giving someone information they can act on, along with the rest of context they have of their situation. No need for you to know them deeply, just the interaction.
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.
If I have to choose between hearing advice (which I can ignore), or not getting any advice at all, I’d much rather get the advice. I’ve ignored a lot of advice in my time, but every once in a while a diamond sneaks through, and often I get an idea or two for a different way of looking at things.
(My analogy for this article only): Ideas gleaned from the article.
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.
I really like this piece - but it points to a wider truth. All advice is contextual.
- 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.
Although I agree with your comment but your comment is naturally making me wonder what are the very few pieces of truly universal good advice that you are mentioning.
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?
My favorite bit of advice ever (poorly paraphrasing Nassim Nicholas Taleb): If you want to be rich or famous - meaning you want to succeed in a field with the potential for exponential growth but a low probability of a large payoff - your best strategy is to maximize your exposure to opportunities with scale potential.
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.
Sadly no one wants the truth, so folks like Jobs and Cuban have to layer it with bromides. Truth is they're both giving the exact same advice, it's just that the honest version is deeply unpopular, because it implies that there is no secret sauce.
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.
There are so many podcasts where "successful" people (within a narrow definition of success) give advice.
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).
I came here to check someone has already made this comment. I tend to pay more attention when someone lists 'luck' as one of the first reasons for their success. I find it's a good indicator that their advice will come with humility.
A ton of YC advice (e.g. I remember a Mondo co-founder) is "We did X, and it really worked, but it was a really bad and dangerous idea, so don't do X" without stopping to think whether X might have been the reason the company survived in the first place. Basically: do as I say, not as I do / did.
You don't ask for advice to have someone else make your decisions for you, rather in the hope that you learn about options you didn't otherwise realize were open to you. You ask for advice to "get out of your head".
It may not be right for you, but you'll have made a better decision for having considered it.
The X-factor of LLM AI advice is how it consists of both artificial and intelligent responses; It cannot cloud judgement by having feelings and will still think very carefully about your problem.
> We trust confident people, even when they're wrong
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.
>Don’t value the experiences of others over your own.
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.
Generally supportive of this blog post (with the caveat on "eat less" but that's addressed by another commenter). It addresses a pain point for me and I appreciate it. It's particularly painful for those of us who tend to be self-critical. No matter what some asshole is telling you you're doing it wrong. I wish people giving the advice would read this as well. I found the "say yes" vs "say no" thing in particular very funny and I'm surprised I never noticed it.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 9.1 ms ] threadThis 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.
The problem was not that we didn’t know what to do ("eat less"), but to enable that solution.
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 mind is always the biggest battle
But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.
Ah yes, our old friend starvation.
War and famine? And no Haber-Bosch process.
> 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 ;(
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.
Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!)
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 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.
This is precisely the thing that cannot be put aside without making the solution much less useful / efficient / solution-esque.
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...
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
Obviously there are dozens of 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.
When carbs spike their blood sugar, insulin swoops in to immediately convert the glucose into fat. When they try to restrict calories, they focus on cutting the wrong macros. Carbs are easy to miscount/underestimate those calories unless you're literally weighing the food.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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).
"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)
It may not be right for you, but you'll have made a better decision for having considered it.
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.
- 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.
Still not sure how to do that...
When you want money, ask for advice.