Comment by hargv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hargv | Hacker News Reader

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>Being fat honestly takes more effort than being at normal weight for someone who's 100% able-bodied.

This is nonsense.

Being fat takes literally no effort at all, all it takes is your discipline slipping a couple nights a week. Being a healthy weight takes (for some) perfect discipline every day, ignoring hunger, putting weight management before everything else in your life, etc.

I've worked physically demanding jobs in paralelll with both long distance running and weightlifting for about 15 years of my life, I've significant muscle mass and good enough cardio to run 15k any day without any particular prep, yet I've hovered around obesity mark for the last 10 years. And now as a parent, any effort to cook leaner food takes time I dont have, as does exercise.

I'm not on any weight loss drugs as I do not want to risk any negative side effects, already being a sleep deprived toddler-parent.

But life is short, and cutting weight can fuck with people mental and physical health a lot before things get better, so for those that need it, 100% do whatever it takes to get to a healthy weight first and then figure it out from there. Spending your 20s-30s-40s struggling and failing to keep a healthy weight is a slow death of its own.

>Being a healthy weight takes (for some) perfect discipline every day, ignoring hunger, putting weight management before everything else in your life, etc.

Why does eating at maintenance calories require “ignoring hunger”?

If a guy is already 80 kg, at 10% BF, and their maintenance calories are 3,000 kcal, they can be perfectly happy and not in a state of hunger while eating 3,000 kcal.

I maintain 10% BF at an FFMI of 25; I am almost never hungry while eating at maintenance.

> But life is short, and cutting weight can fuck with people’s mental and physical health a lot before things get better, so for those who need it, 100% do whatever it takes to get to a healthy weight first and then figure it out from there.

Only if you are running massive deficits, which is what most newbies/crash dieters do. Emotional, knee-jerk-style dieting is not sustainable dieting.

60 years ago obesity in every stable country was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Are people 10-50x less disciplined today? Really? Or are there just more incentives for processed food companies to sell you their crap? Are quick dopamine hits so easily accessible that people are becoming less driven? Is mainstream society not pressuring obese people enough to change course for being unhealthy?

Yes there's WAY more distractions today, and all those factors make it harder to navigate life practicing healthy habits, but you still have agency. The natural state of the human body is to use calories. The brain alone burns an astonishing amount of calories just thinking. Also no one's force feeding you anything.

There's plenty of countries with a lower "quality of life" index that barely have obesity problems. Maybe the natural tendency of the human body is not to slowly get fat?

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