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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

The answer is always that someone has found some sort of program to follow that helps them eat less calories. I've not seem anyone ever try the approach of "avoid foods that taste good" but its not a bad idea probably. Just never ever bring good tasting, easy to prep food into the house.

Now you gotta work for food you don't really want.

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This is also related to replacing simple sugars with more complex metabolites. Having your blood sugar go way up and down leads to metabolic stress and feeling hungry all the time. On the other side are fats and fibers which have a comparatively high capacity to sate hunger per calorie. Eating 2000 calories of donuts every morning may be correct from an energy balance perspective (and indeed you won't get fat doing it), but that's clearly a very painful way to live.

Insulin and blood glucose drive obesity and metabolic damage, but they don't make it hard to stay on diets. The difficulty of staying on a diet is due to a separate system in your brain that takes other factors in to account to decide if you should eat. Every successful diet boils down to finding foods that make your brain happy while keeping excessive levels (and durations) of sugar and insulin out of your blood[0].

If you had access to unlimited candy, you might eat too much and damage your body - and indeed many people do just that. If you had access to unlimited non-starchy vegtables your stomach capacity probably wouldn't be enough to maintain obesity. If you had access to unlimited sticks of butter, you would probably get sick of the very concept of butter before you ate an unhealthy number of sticks. Vegan and carnivorous diets largely rely on the last two facts.

[0] There are other things involved in your body's metabolic signaling system, but blood glucose and insulin are especially well-researched and easy to measure.

I think the question for me is how these various things help people eat less calories. E.g., my mental model of hunger used to be like the "E" light on a car dashboard. But through various experimentation, I've noticed that the nature of hunger is very different for me depending on things.

E.g., if I avoid eating refined carbs (sugar, white flour, etc) for a month or so, suddenly hunger is this mild, easily tolerable sensation. I just end up eating less. If I go back on them for a while, hunger returns to being MUST EAT NOW.

I used to hear people talk about forgetting to eat, and I would always think, "How is that even possible?" But now I know: we might use the same word, but the experience can be very different.

I've had similar experience with trying intermittent fasting, I expected that fasting was supposed to be a challenge to put up with a mildly unpleasant experience because it's good for you.

But no, the fasting periods were merely times when I wasn't eating, and that includes pushing them out to 30+ hours and going a day without eating and without much hunger on a couple of occasions.

Occasionally, I've had experiences where running was light and energeising and fun, during that intermittent fasting time. I suspect now that the people who say they can't live without exercise and "exercise should be a celebration of what you can do" feel this the majority of the time. In the past, almost always a drag to push through.

I've been on a 16:8 IF schedule for around 10 months now and I have lost around 10 kgs, without any exercise. I don't feel stuffed all the time now and my mind has become clearer. But that could also be because I replaced alcohol with weed and started meditating. I haven't done any checkups but I think my health has improved vastly.

I worked with a woman at a medium sized food service company who was responsible for labeling items as “good” and “bad” on all our products to help people to eat “healthy”. (Hard boiled eggs bad, high carb high calorie roasted peas good that kind of stuff) We chatted a lot but she told me one day that her diet strategy was just eating the blandest foods possible. I mean I guess it worked, she wasn’t overweight. Explains why everything she rated healthy tasted like cardboard, I guess.

Michael Pollan has a funny food rule: you can eat all the sweeties that you cook your self. You can eat a lot of chocolate cake, but you must bake it.

> I've not seem anyone ever try the approach of "avoid foods that taste good"

This is what I do, or try to do. This seems high on the self-denial scale but in my case I noticed that simple foods taste better than you think they as you learn to appreciate them, especially if you let yourself get hungry first. I tend to not over-eat such food as much.

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